Simplifficulty

I just coined my first word. It stands for the difficulty found in simplicity. An oxymoron? Hardly.

Contrary to popular belief, simplicity is very difficult to create. It just might be the most challenging part of what I do. I read a quote once…

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, that’s creativity.

I couldn’t agree more. Take this screenshot for example:

It’s incredibly well done. To a layman, there’s nothing to it. “Even I could do that,” one might say. To a designer, however, it’s not easy to create something that simple.

There are a couple of things that I personally can attribute to simplicity: creativity and discipline.

Being creative

Like the quote above, creativity has a huge role in simplistic solutions (in both design and programming). And this is because (most of the time) all of those “things” that would naturally play into a complex solution still need to be there; they just need to appear simplistic. Illusions thrive on creative minds.

Being able to write a single sentence about a product or service, accurately explaining its purpose, is not easy. I bet that sentence in the screenshot went through several iterations before making the homepage. But look at the reward: an extremely simple design that explains exactly what the service does.

And the fact that this front page is so bare bones is a good thing, because it makes me want to know more. Another side-effect of a simplistic design.

Good design in general is largely due to creative thinking, but especially when creating something simple.

Having discipline

Being a programmer and a designer, I have to really pay attention to feature/design creep. I have tendencies to think “it’s not quite enough” all too often. It’s those little touches and tweaks that can really take something simple and turn it into something that completely misses the point; a bloated mess.

If that sentence in the screenshot were a paragraph, explaining more details, it would never get read. If there were surrounding elements all over the page, chances are it would be overlooked.

Now, I guarantee the designer felt the urge to add more. But he was disciplined enough to leave it alone. In design, discipline is the name of the game.

Conclusion

The next time you see something overtly simplistic, just know that it was probably very difficult to create. While the “keep it simple” phrase lurks around my day-to-day thoughts, it’s an ongoing challenge to practice what I preach, so to speak.

In other words, beware of simplifficulty.