The beauty of a simple design.

Now, here is a question people have been struggling to answer for quite sometime now: what is a good design? How do we recognize a good design? Lots of companies would give plenty of money to answer those questions in a simple manner. Well, Graham gives us the answer:

It seems strange to have to emphasize simplicity. You'd think simple would be the default. Ornate is more work. But something seems to come over people when they try to be creative. Beginning writers adopt a pompous tone that doesn't sound anything like the way they speak. Designers trying to be artistic resort to swooshes and curlicues. Painters discover that they're expressionists. It's all evasion. Underneath the long words or the "expressive" brush strokes, there's not much going on, and that's frightening.

When you're forced to be simple, you're forced to face the real problem. When you can't deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance.

(Graham: p. 133)

Yet, somehow one gets the impression that most companies wouldn't buy that answer. Why not? As Graham says, we still associate the term good design to original and artistic and, in turn, we also associate those to something overly complex, cool. We fool ourselves. In reality, what we like is what's simple and yet it works, what helps us achieve our goal in the most sensible manner. While most geeks tend to despise the end-user as a simpleton, in reality simplicity is one of the most difficult things to achieve in design. Few people get it. That's why Steve Jobs makes the big bucks. That's why Apple still kicks butt and, in a different order of things, that's also why GNOME and Ubuntu have been winning the battle on the Linux front.