The more I work with people, the more I realize how much afraid people are when it comes to simplifying things.
Stakeholders are afraid of emptiness on landing pages. “Too much empty space here and here… let’s reduce the paddings.” The result — I think they never realize — is a botched up landing page that just doesn’t stand out. Worse. It just looks bad.
There’s a lot of talk about single CTAs, focus, “One Single Thing” etc. and I get excited that someone, finally, is speaking the language of simplicity and focus. But then, it’s mere lip service. When it comes to walking the talk, fear and doubt reign supreme and lead to some of the shoddiest design decisions I’ve seen.
Besides the fact that simplicity is a complicated thing, it’s also a lot of emptiness, lots of whitespace, lots of discarding things (that look important), lots of “No"s, lots of "we’ll do just this thing, everything else goes out the window”.
Which calls for boldness. And that’s plainly lacking.
This fear has permeated so well that it’s now second-nature to everything that these people do. In life, in work, in hobbies, in side-projects… the fear is so deep-seated that there’s general aversion to simplicity and a strong aversion to conscious simplification.
We’re so busy accumulating things in our lives that not having things has become a glitch in the matrix. And yet, we admire things that are simplistic — from smartly designed apps to minimalist people who shed stuff every year.
Stakeholders in companies are afraid of not doing a hundred other things in order to focus on the one thing that’s most important. Afraid that they’d be wasting their time. Afraid of the vast emptiness they feel when they don’t keep scrolling, clicking, drafting emails, talking, meeting, discussing…
Developers are afraid of thinking about simpler alternatives at the cost of losing functionality. So much so that sometimes, a better functionality is let go because the status quo works great and it takes a lot of courage to drop a feature we have built. At times, it’s so blatant it makes me cringe.
And most interestingly, people are afraid of the emptiness of not doing anything. Every minute, every hour, every day has to be filled. With “Exciting Things to Do”, “Exciting Places to Go”, “Exciting Food to Eat”. Food and travel are the only popular things people do. And these are the only things that seem to excite people. So much so that even a meeting of self-styled “book lovers” meets only in exotic cafes.
Designing a simple life is not just hard but we’ve accumulated so much stuff into our lives — at all levels — that it’s also become an act of immense courage.
Even people who think they have designed their life to be simple, I notice, aren’t even aware of the massive complexities they stick to. It’s such a hypocritic society. There’s almost zero attention to detail. So-called writers don’t hit the space-bar after a period but think highly of themselves. People who read up a manual on Material Design just last night think they can now do motion design while all they can do is slap together a senseless, illogical assortment of jQuery animations. Company-runners present seminars on focus but turn up every morning to plant a feet in every murky water — leading to nowhere because of course there’s no focus.
These things — simplicity and minimalism — cannot be applied in isolation. You need to embrace minimalism everywhere if you want that to permeate and come through in the work you do. You need to embrace simplicity everywhere in order for it to come through in the way you think. These things are not pastel colors that you can apply on the canvas when you want to. They are the canvas. It’s there in totality or it isn’t.