Communicating doesn’t have to mean keeping it all.
I just finished reading an insightful book entitled The Laws of Simplicity in which John Maeda (MIT Media professor and designer) suggests ten principles for balancing simplicity with complexity in today’s technologically choked world. Maeda’s first law is simply to REDUCE. He writes, “The process of reaching an ideal state of simplicity can be truly complex… we would choose to keep all the functionality if we could… When in doubt, just remove. But be careful of what you remove.”
From human relationships to the iPhone, when one looks thoughtfully at things of worth, more often than not, they’re things that strike a reasonable balance between relevance and irrelevance. The magic is in the distillation. Balancing simplicity with complexity in communications doesn’t mean going without. Rather, it means abandoning a perceived obligation to keep “all the functionality” at the expense of clarity.
