The Beauty of Simplicity
A client photocopied the beauty of simplicity (no link available yet) for me last week (an article from Fast Company's November issue.) My favorite quote--which will not be a surprise to anyone who knows me or who has seen Edward Tufte's fantastic and mildly subversive The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint print on my office wall--relates to Royal Philips Electronics, a company that has reportedly taken simplicity to heart over the last decade with a Sense & Sensibility campaign that applies to their products and the company itself.
Even things as prosaic as business meetings have been nudged in the direction of simplicity: The company now forbids more than 10 slides in any PowerPoint presentation. Just enough, they decided, was more.
The article begins with a profile of Marissa Mayer, dubbed the "high priestess of simplicity" at Google, who is responsible for the uncluttered look of Google's homepage. (Thanks Marissa!) The article also lists TiVo, Apple's iPod, Skype, and Blackberry by RIM as examples of simplicity.