Last year, I was working as a founding engineer for an early stage startup. We were working on a pitch deck, and I was trying to make it really well designed and professional. I'm a former artist so even though I'm not strictly speaking a designer, I have enough visual chops to make it look pretty.

So anyways, I put hours and hours of effort into this pitch deck. When we presented it to our advisors, they tore it apart - not because of the visual aesthetics but more so because the content itself wasn't good enough.

I was pretty upset that I had spent all this time making it "look nice" and now have to go back and redo a lot of the content, so I told myself "just get rid of everything that isn't 'design'". That way I could just focus on the content itself without having to waste time on the visuals.

What happened is that the end result of this process genuinely looked way better than before. When I stripped the design out, the design came to life.