LAWS OF SIMPLICITY
Laws 5 & 6: Differences and Context

Simplicity and complexity need each other. Without one, we cannot see the other— in design we need a little of both so the audience can recognize what they see because of what they don’t.  Take, for example, the Japanese tea traditions that Maeda explains when he visits his old friend Tanaka; the tea cups are black, garish, and complex, and Maeda is unsure of how to even drink from it. But because of its asymmetry and unneeded complexity, it “made everything already impossibly simple, become even simpler.” To translate this into data-form is to say that people need information or data to be simple in order to understand its complexity. As designers, this is our ultimate and ongoing task, to visually explain complex ideas in an informative and simple manner.

What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral. Striving for excellence usually entails the sacrifice of everything in the background for the sake of attending to the all-important foreground. So, essentially, much like the simplicity/complexity dynamic, when there is less, we appreciate everything much more. There is an important trade-off between being completely lost in the unknown and completely found in the familiar. “Too familiar can have the positive aspect of making complete sense, which to some can seem boring, too unknown can have the negative connotations of danger, which to some can seem a thrill.” Thus on a design scale, we must be able to find a balance between how directed we wish to feel, and how directionless we can afford to be. Complexity implies the feeling of being lost; simplicity implies the feeling of being found. Everyone knows you must be lost in order to then be found, and in this same way, we must have complexity in order to have simplicity— and we as designers, it is our job to navigate the in-between.