Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery, 2nd Edition

The Art of Working with Restrictions

My friends at Universal Studios Japan—Jasper von Meerheimb, senior art director, and Sachiko Kawamura, senior environmental graphic designer—gave an excellent presentation for Design Matters Japan on the issue of how restrictive conditions put on creative projects can lead to inventive solutions. In their presentation, they talked about how to develop concepts and implement them under constraints such as limited time, space, and budgets. For professional designers, creating great work under a thousand constraints and limitations imposed from the outside is simply the way the world of design works. Whether constraints are good or bad, enabling or crippling, is in a sense irrelevant; constraints are the way ...