simplicity

“Limit everything to the essential but do not remove the poetry.”

— Dieter Rams, quoted in Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams

We learned the hard way that new products are hard enough to figure out, and we should make as many things as familiar as possible. Again, life and new products are hard enough. When you can use a familiar term instead of being original, do so. Never opt for a solution that is more creative but less effective.

Here's what I've come to see as the guiding light of my life: simple ideas, explained very clearly. You only really need, like, one or two compelling ideas that you deeply understand. And then you have to be able to make other people understand them, which is the hard part. You have to distill, and in a way distillation is harder than creation.... See more