Simple is No Guarantee of Beautiful
I have a bone to pick.
Not with a person, per say, but with something else entirely: an idea. You’ve probably heard it before, and my guess is that it struck a cord:
“Simple is beautiful.”
I can feel some of you nodding your heads right now.
The premise of the phrase is this: the simpler we make an idea, the more powerful it becomes. Simplicity is a weapon, it argues, a sword to be wielded on our quest to cut through the noise of our modern world. With it in our hands, our path to clarity - and the beauty it provides - emerges before us.
But what if I told you this phrase was wrong? That it is directionally correct, but off in magnitude? That, like for many things, the dose makes the poison? And that it is far too easy to take this advice much too far?
What if I told you that while simple can be beautiful, it is no guarantee of beautiful?
Origins
Let’s start with two things: what it is, and where it comes from.
If there is one thing that we can say about the phrase simple is beautiful, it is that it practices what it preaches. It consists of a mere three words that come packaged with layers of insight behind them. Simple is beautiful is, in fact, both simple and beautiful.
I remember thinking exactly this the first time I came across it. I couldn’t help but notice that it was a perfect condensation of something I’d been discovering about communication: while we think that ‘more’ enhances our messages, more often than not it distracts instead.
We fall into this trap frequently, shooting to make our ideas as clear as possible by layering in as much detail as we can. Yet in the process, we often lose the message we were trying to convey in the first place. Sometimes (if not most times), I thought, we’d be better off just getting to the damn point.
And if we look throughout history, there is a lot to suggest that this is true. As an idea, “simple is beautiful” has gained centuries worth of staying power - we can find it encapsulated in various forms, from mental models (eg: Occam’s Razor - the simplest reason is the likeliest reason) to pithy principles (eg: KISS - keep it simple, stupid) and even in quotes from the society’s greats (eg: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” - Leonardo da Vinci, 1452).
We’ve seen its lessons represented for so long and in so many different ways that we can say the idea itself is “lindy” - its life expectancy for the future must be especially long, if only as a result of its endurance to this point in time. Endurance begets more endurance.
Yet phrases only persist through time if their words carry an underlying truth within them. The ones that do not quickly become lost to the sands of time. And in the case of simple is beautiful, that truth is an antidote to a common flaw humans possess: by nature, we love to overcomplicate things. Turning a simple, easily understood idea into something overly complex seems to be intrinsic to who we are as a species, almost as if it is written into our DNA.
But why? Why would a strategy so seemingly inefficient sneak past the filters of evolution? If only the fittest tactics are meant to make it through, how did this one survive?
For a simple reason that has been, is, and always will be true: because complexity makes us sound smart. Or at least so we think.
We rationalize it like this: the more profound an explanation we can give, the more we must know about a given topic. And thus the smarter we are. The ability to dive into the nuances of a topic is like a badge of honor, a bragging right to be waved around in the face of others to inflate our self-esteem. Whether right or wrong, knowledge is often the bar by which we measure ourselves against everyone else.
Unfortunately, the world frequently rewards this strategy. Businesses dress up their internal processes in fancy language. Professors scribble red all over our papers demanding more detail. Theses balloon to 300+ pages long. The scientific community is perhaps the worst offender - when is the last time you came across a research paper written for the average person to understand? One that wasn’t wrapped up in wording only those with PHDs can understand?
But while we strive for knowledge of the details, there is a curse that comes alongside them: the more we know - and the more we share - the less we are heard. As we layer in increasing amounts of detail, the core of the idea we were attempting to communicate in the first place tends to become obscured by other non-relevant facts. We take our listeners on a zig-zagged path to understanding, exhausting them along the way. And as we lose the forrest for the trees, our audience quickly follows suit.
Given this context, “simple is beautiful” is fantastic advice. Listening to its words protects us from ourselves - we avoid our biases for complexity by staying as far away from it as possible. The phrase becomes a razor with which we can out the truth of our message, and package it in a way our audience can understand.
But underlying all this is a catch-22: a phrase can be simple, but that says absolutely nothing about whether or not it is worth a damn.
Simple means nothing if it is not valuable. And in our never-ending quest to condense from complexity, we often strip out the detail that made the idea matter in the first place.
A simple idea that is useless - perhaps unsurprisingly - is still useless.
We are not looking for simple at the expense of utility. We are looking for something much better instead.
Lessons from Design
What we are searching for is not a singular end point, but rather a balance. We don’t want simplicity for simplicity’s sake. Instead, we want profound simplicity - an idea that is simple in its presentation yet powerful in its impact.
One without the other is no good. A powerful yet overly complex idea risks losing its message in translation; but a simple idea with no usefulness isn’t worth translating at all.
This balance can be difficult to strike, but there is a path. And if we look for the world to give us a blueprint for doing so, we find that there are few better equipped to show us the way than the domain of design.
A Golden Era - The Romans
A juxtaposition between past and present experiences helped this concept click for me.
During the fall of my junior year in college, I studied abroad in Rome. It was a transcendent and perspective altering experience, among the most enjoyable 5 months of my life. Over the course of that semester, I learned a great number of things - about culture, about language, about the world. But I learned even more about beauty.
Few things will teach you about the concept like living amongst it every day.
Every corner you turn in Rome is an opportunity for your breath to be taken away. The sunset view from atop Aventine Hill. The winding streets of Trastevere. The golden dome of St. Peter’s, and the frescas that adorn its insides. Each representative - yet by no means exhaustive - of the beauty around you at every second.
The level of detail through the city is astounding. You can spend hours exploring but one masterpiece and still leave feeling as if there is more to uncover. So much so that I suppose the same logic could be applied to the city itself - even after 5 months in Rome, I left with the feeling that I had only just begun uncovering its secrets.
Yet while the artistry is robust everywhere you look, all of that beauty comes packaged with an accompanying simplicity. Each piece has a core idea behind it: its function.
Take St. Peter’s, as an example - even amidst all its magnificence, it is still but a church. Its adornments and detail mean naught if its form does not allow it to serve as a place of worship. Or consider Ponte Sant’Angelo, the bridge that spans the Tiber to connect the city center and Castel San’Angelo. The angels that accent its railing are merely an enhancement to the bridge’s true function - a walkway pedestrians can traverse from one side of the river to the other.
Each work of Roman art or architecture has a true purpose, one that most frequently relates to the functional role it is meant to play. But what makes the city especially unique is that that function of each work - the churches meant for worship, the bridges meant to be walked - is enhanced by its form. The details added in each - paintings, statues, carvings, and the like - do not distract from the core message. Instead, they amplify it - creating something both unique and marvelous in the process.
There are millions of churches around the world, yet there is only one St. Peters. Millions of bridges, but only one Ponte Sant’Angelo. Millions of estates, but only one Villa Borghese. Millions of statues, but only one Pietà.
You get the point. The power in the Roman design philosophy is that they found a path to making everything with a simple function exceptionally beautiful at the same time.
But it seems this is a lesson we have long since forgotten.
Modern Regression
Contrast Roman design with that of the modern era, and you will quickly see the perils of taking simplicity too far.
If we were to think of design philosophy as a sliding scale, the Roman and modern approaches would be found at opposite ends. Where the Romans sought to enhance function through form - using detail to amplify the core of the message - our modern design philosophies do the opposite. We now bias towards function at all costs, often leaving form to the wayside. We opt for simple - for useful - but at the expense of beautiful.
You can see this in virtually every modern design avenue you choose to look at. From bathroom designs to doorknobs and even to corporate logos, everything is starting to resemble everything else. Function is being preserved - buildings still remain standing, elevators still go up and down, doors still open - but there is something that has been lost in the process. The world is becoming simpler and ever more functional, but only by trading off against the details that bring it to life.
The result is an amalgamation of sameness, such that everything comes to resemble everything else. Uniqueness - the trait that truly makes something memorable - is being eroded along the way.
Why has this happened? While I can’t say with certainty, I do have a theory. My best guess is that this is the long tail result of living in an era of excess and abundance. Today’s world is one of ‘stuff’ - such that we are accumulating more of it than ever before. Whether in the physical or digital domains, our closets are increasingly becoming filled to the brim.
It appears that many of us share the intuition that this is not the way to live, as if there is a failsafe built into our human operating systems by evolution. We know this can’t be natural, because in the story of history, the world has existed in a state of scarcity for much longer than it has existed in one of abundance.
And so, we look for a way to fight back. As the complexity around us expands, we find safe harbor in simplicity. Increasingly, our response to a maximal world is to counteract it with minimalism - in our words, our furniture, our architecture, and more.
Simple becomes the ultimate prize. We care not how we get there, only that we do. We reduce at all costs, stripping away the details in the hopes that we can save both time and energy. We search for the simplest explanation to a question, the simplest representation of an idea.
As a result, society has become ever more functional. Ever more efficient. But in doing so, we are left to wonder - where are our modern St. Peter’s, our creations that deliver on their necessary function but only when packaged with a staggering amount of beauty?
The answer: they don’t exist. Because in our never-ending quest for simplicity, we have lost a bit of ourselves along the way.
Caution Signs
Okay, but what does all of this mean in regards to communicating our ideas?
To make your ideas stand out - yes, by all means make sure that they are simple. Too many throughout history have utilized simplicity as a razor for us to disregard its worth. But recognize that your ideas must be beautiful, too; that the simplicity of an idea says nothing about its value; that simple is no guarantee of beautiful.
Here, it is important to recognize a few things that simple is not, so that we may better understand what it is. Simple does not merely mean “saying something short”, nor does it suggest we are looking for “easy words”. It is not sound bites or value statements, nor the most dumbed down version of an idea we can find.
Instead, simple is about density. About elegance compressed into a small package, a tiny phrase that carries with it a heavy weight. Simple is a stick of dynamite - something small and compact yet brimming with an explosive energy, a powerful truth.
This is our goal when we communicate an idea - to find the equilibrium between simplicity and complexity. We must find the core of the idea and represent it in a way that is both simple and beautiful.
To do so requires a finely tuned scalpel, like a sculptor crafting a masterpiece from a block of marble. We start with a big slab of rock - a rough idea - and begin to chisel away, lopping off pieces with an end in mind. We prioritize and eliminate, choosing what deserves to stay to make our point, and that which should be cast to the cutting room floor.
But as we get closer to finish, to that end state of our compressed idea, we need be wary of stripping away what makes it unique in the first place. As we’ve seen, it is far to easy to aim for simple and wind up with bland instead. So where reduction was our friend at the start, we must swap it for preservation as we near the end. The more our idea starts to crystalize, the more we must make sure we preserve that which makes it unique.
Here, we would be wise to borrow some advice from history. Consider the following quotes, both reminders of the tightrope we are trying to walk:
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler” - Albert Einstein
“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (French aviator)
Each gets at the ultimate point: you must know how much of an idea can be stripped away before it starts to lose its essence; the point at which simplicity starts to rob of us beauty. And make no mistake - it will, if we are not careful. Ideas can quickly go from complex and useful to simple but useless, in but the snap of a finger.
Neither is preferable. Again, balance is our goal. The quest for simplicity should not stop us from striving for beauty as well. The two are meant to exist in harmony, such that neither takes precedence at the expense of the other.
Succinct enough to be finishable, yet distinct enough to be memorable. That is the destination.
So how do we get there?
Roadmap
To find the balance we seek, it can be helpful to think of communication as a checklist - one with three steps, and an order of operations:
Discover (Find the idea you wish to communicate)
Distill (Strip it down to its most essential form)
Detail (Preserve and enhance its soul through the fine lining that brings it to life)
Discover
Step 1 is intuitive: discover. We start by identifying the idea we wish to communicate, like a sculptor looking for the right piece of marble with which to work. Crafting a masterpiece necessitates high quality stone, and only once we have selected the proper materials can the art begin.
So we kick off our journey with a process of exploration, shifting through our options to find the ones worthy of attention and care. To do so necessitates getting comfortable with exclusion, to use it as our friend. Counterintuitively, discovery is as much about what we choose not to work with as it is about what we do.
To help with getting started, I like to ask a simple question - one I find carries equal value regardless of the setting:
What single idea is giving you the most energy right now, the thing that you cannot stop thinking about?
The rationale is simple: if there is something that keeps consuming your mind, taking your thoughts along with it at a whim, there is likely a powerful truth underneath it waiting to be uncovered. Rather than fighting against your subconscious, it is best to lean in. After all, if something captures your attention it is likely that it will capture that of others as well.
The answer to this question serves as your starting material - the right block of marble ready to have the statue waiting within it unveiled. And now that we have something worth saying in the first place, the real work can begin.
Distill
With an idea in hand, we now look to bring it to life. And to do so requires moving to step 2: distill.
It is here where we shift from excavator to sculptor, where we exchange our shovel for a scalpel. With a new tool in hand, we begin the process of chiseling away at our idea by using simplicity as a our guide. We search for the essence of the idea - the single kernel of truth that packs with it the most powerful punch, the one thing worth remembering above all else.
Here, we are searching for simple - and finding it requires but a single question:
If you could only leave one thing about your idea planted in someone’s mind after experiencing it, what do you wish it to be?
Why is this all we need? Because when we identify what is essential to an idea - the one primary thing - we naturally uncover what is non-essential as well. These are two sides of the same coin: knowledge of one tells us a great deal about the other.
Here again, exclusion comes in useful. The challenge of finding the core idea lies in the fact that this idea is singular, not plural. There can only be one core idea, in the same way that there can only be one ‘North Star’ or one ‘most important goal’. And as such, a conflict of interest comes to light: we must take the leap to toss out the important ideas that simply aren’t the most important. As the popular piece of writing advice goes, we must ‘kill our darlings’.
Our goal here is thus two-fold: we must preserve the core component of our idea while discarding the scraps. In stripping away the pieces of marble not meant to be part of the final statue, we in turn better highlight that which remains.
Upon doing so, we have taken a bigger idea and brought it’s core insight to light, chiseling away to find it’s ultimate shape. But we are not done yet - we have crafted something simple, certainly, but perhaps not something beautiful.
If we are to accomplish both, there is one step that remains.
Detail
Imagine if Michaelangelo had carved but the shape of The David, quitting before adding the details that bring it to life - the curls of hair on its head, the chiseled physique, the sling that slayed Goliath resting in its left hand. Would we consider it the masterpiece we do today if he had?
No, of course not. Because it is the details that most bring The David to life - without them it is merely a statue, rather than a masterpiece.
The same can be said for ideas, our messages, our words. It is in this stage - in the detailing - where they truly begin to shine. Because while simple may be found in the core, beautiful lies in the details.
See, ideas are like seeds - small packages that contain the potential for something great within them. But they are incapable of reaching their grandest visions on their own - without the proper nutrients, they are destined to fall short of what they are capable of becoming.
Details are the nourishment our ideas need to become the best versions of themselves. They help the core of a message grow into something great, providing the appropriate resources to support its growth along the way.
The key word here is appropriate. Just like carefully tending to a plant in the garden, our goal is to strike a balance between under-nourished and over-nourished. Between too little detail and too much. We want to find the right amount of support for our ideas to give them the backing they need, but not so much to distract from the main message we want to convey.
And so here, let me provide two more lines of questioning worth considering as it relates to detailing our ideas:
Does you idea feel bland, like it has a function but lacks a soul? Does it require slightly more context, a few more lines and a little more shading to bring its message to light?
Does your idea feel too vibrant, like its soul is on display so much that it is distracting from the main message? What details can you strip away to balance the scale towards simplicity?
These questions serve as counterbalances to each other, helping us walk the line between too simple and too complex. Between bland and beautiful. When answered in tandem like a back and forth tug of way, they help us find that spot that is ‘just right’ - where we have detailed our idea just enough to bring it to life, but not so much that we have lost it’s core along the way.
With the answer to both in hand, they help us carve a path to something that is both simple and beautiful.
Fin
And so, let us close with this.
As you look around at the world, start to pay attention to the dichotomies that exist between function and form, between structure and soul. Between simplicity and beauty.
Ask yourself the following question: is simple truly beautiful? Are the two in fact one and the same? Or is there something missing from that statement, such that you can very easily have one without the other?
The more you pay attention, the more I believe you will recognize this powerful truth: simple can be beautiful, but it is in fact no guarantee.
We have taken the phrase too far. Too often we are biasing towards less in our words, our ideas - taking the short cut in presentation of a message in the name of the holy grail of simplicity. The result is the world we live in today - one that is has become ever more functional, but only at the expense of its soul.
Know that there is a better way, an alternate reality where the two concepts dance together rather than apart. A world in which we can create simple things that resonate precisely because they are beautiful as well.
History has shown us that one need not take precedence at the expense of the other. Simple and beautiful is the goal.
And in that simple rephrasing lies all the difference.