best low poly workflow without decimate I've been playing around with low poly as a design style lately and after watching a talk from GDC about low poly design I had a quick question. It was stated in the talk to avoid using the decimate modifier but I can't find many other workflow tutorials that don't use it. 

What are the best techniques to start learning to avoid decimating or is decimate generally an actual acceptable practice?
Well, another option would be to use limited dissolve in edit mode. What this does is find subdivided faces that are relative to one another, and share the same position (i.e. a subdivided plane), and merge them into a single face. This would make a subdivided face a normal face once again.

Do this by going to edit mode mesh > clean up > limited dissolve. This function has been useful for me, and I hope it will help you!