John Maeda offers ten laws for balancing simplicity and complexity in business, technology, and design:
- Reduce: the simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction
- Organize: organization makes a system of many appear fewer
- Time: savings in time feel like simplicity
- Learn: knowledge makes everything simpler; therefore train the user
- Differences: simplicity and complexity need each other
- Context: what lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral (let the user comfortably lost)
- Emotion: more emotions are better than less
- Trust: in simplicity we trust (before getting more elaborate)
- Failure: some things can never be made simple (Google maps launch in the browser)
- The One: simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful