We’re living in a time where people are driven to make things more complicated than they need to be.

Although the internet has enabled people to have a kind of digital freedom, many are now in the business of filling that void with an enormous quantity of content. Most of it would be better if people took the time to focus their efforts on understanding who exactly they are speaking to–and why.

The best ideas come from a process of stripping away all that is not needed. A beginner designer will be tempted to do the opposite: add features that they believe the user may want, possibly trying to make a solution more interesting. Resist that urge. The right solution is a good balance of customer needs, budget, schedule, and creativity.

Why are people driven to make things more complex than they need to be? Because it is easier.

Reducing an idea to its essence takes time and patience. It can also be hard to determine when to stop fine-tuning and editing until exactly the right moment. The benefit of having constraints is that it can help people focus.

The challenge with freedom is that you really can do anything you want. What appears to be a chaotic mess of a process is just people working to find the right solutions.

With innovation and creating technology, you need this kind of freedom in order to generate ideas and test solutions because it enables the exploration of the greatest number of options. In this kind of system, people are driven to seek novelty because not doing so is a failure.

[Photo:  Simple, clear, and elegant.]