10 Rules of Simplicity

John Maeda offers ten laws for balancing simplicity and complexity in business, technology, and design:

  1. Reduce: the simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction
  2. Organize: organization makes a system of many appear fewer
  3. Time: savings in time feel like simplicity
  4. Learn: knowledge makes everything simpler; therefore train the user
  5. Differences: simplicity and complexity need each other
  6. Context: what lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral (let the user comfortably lost)
  7. Emotion: more emotions are better than less
  8. Trust: in simplicity we trust (before getting more elaborate)
  9. Failure: some things can never be made simple (Google maps launch in the browser)
  10. The One: simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful