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.