MINIMALISM VS SIMPLICITY

There is a tendency for designers to embrace minimalism. Or at least they happily claim to do so. However, the reality is that what turns them on is not minimalism; it is simplicity. There is a difference. Minimalism—spinning into everyday culture through its origin in the 1950s as an art movement—is about starting from nothing and having less so as to keep things to a bare minimum. It leans toward an extreme. Simplicity, on the other hand, possesses a greater degree of humanity by reducing things while still maintaining ideal functionality. For example: imagine a modern kitchen. The minimalist kitchen started from zero and adds in perhaps a few juice glasses on a recessed shelf along with maybe five pots and pans hanging on the wall. There is a single sponge, but no soap. That's it. We all know that we need many things for a kitchen to function such as a coffee maker, dish soap, toaster, napkins, paper towels, etc. But do we go ahead and put the blender, smoothie glasses, and an ice bucket on the counter? No. We keep it simple by finding a happy medium. In the images above a designer has applied minimalism to package design. The corn flakes become very generic and is stripped of a juicy image of the product, which factors into consumer purchase decisions. The Nutella, on the other hand, can live with this minimalism because the product itself is visible through the glass jar. One problem with all of this is that removing color and personality from the logos detracts from the brand identity.

Something minimalism lacks that simplicity has is the art of arrangement. Being simple requires the ability to arrange with purpose and perception. There is a whole book on the subject called Arranging Things: A Rhetoric of Object Placement.

DON'T TELL ME THEY ACTUALLY LEGISLATED

Detail of map

The New York Times did a nice job with the information design of the graphics showing how the Senate voted to repeal the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. There was an emphasis on clarity here, as the details were kept to a minimum and the graphics were boiled down to bare minimum. For example, the designer used the typical red and blue colors to indicate party. But s/he did so in such as way so as to keep those colors, using slight modifications, to indicate three different data sets: Yes, No, and Didn't vote. It was smart to group the "No" and "Didn't vote" groups vis-a-vis desaturated color. I do wonder, however, if the map would be an even easier read if the "No" squares had the diagonal lines in the fully saturated color. Or... perhaps the designer intentionally made the "No" squares desaturated in the same tones as "Didn't vote" so as to make the viewer optically group those together, leaving the "Yes" squares to stand out since they're the only saturated colors. This then creates an emphasis on the "Yes", which is to say the passage of the vote. It is subtle, but this designer manipulated information to propagate the "Yes" (it's about damn time!) vote.

I think that in the future, several generations from now, when we see maps like these, we'll absorb them in one whole visual gulp without needing to put together the parts to make sense of a whole. These graphics do a really good job of hastening that gap closure.

PLANK TREE AND MENORAH

Wood & Wool Wooden Plank Trees (apprx. 45 cm high)

In the vast world of Christmas decoration there is a fine line between tasteful and tacky. Get your design on by hanging a representation of a tree on your wall. How wonderfully simple and rustic. And a good example of appropriation.


And... a simple, rustic menorah to match.