Simplicity
Simplicity is difficult, after all, no less than complexity. Both require taste and skill. Neither is less artificial or more natural than the other. Both are necessary for good writing. And when either becomes a forced regimen, exclusive of the other, the results can be only hideous. Good writing is produced not by forsaking the beautiful for the sublime or the exorbitant for the restrained, but by finding new ways of orchestrating the interplay between them.
Much of good design is refusing to do what’s bad.
Designing a New Old Home: Materials and Hardware
Elegance is a popular place. Dieter Rams, a massively influential product designer and successor to Bauhaus, popularized the functionalist school of thought, invoked famously in the designs of Apple products. In his Ten Principles for Good Design, Mr. Rams states rule number 10 is “Good Design is as little design as possible”, explaining it’s “less but better”:
“because it concentrates on the essential aspects and the products are not burdened with inessential”
Counterpoints: Messiness and Complexity
First off, that last link in the previous section: In Praise of Messy Design
Yet, when I meet with other experienced game designers, we find ourselves admitting to fascination with decidedly inelegant game designs, and envious of those designers that permit themselves this kind of latitude. ... Maybe I enjoy messy design because it allows for more variety. When you cut away the unnecessary and create only the ‘critical’ gameplay and systems, you are following a design path to its logical endpoint. There only needs to be one Threes because it is already perfect; you can derive variations, but you cannot improve on it (sorry 2048). There is only one perfect toothbrush handle.
A previous post on here, It's Complicated:
There's a growing tendency to treat simplicity as a proxy for correctness
which links out to more of Sarris's writing, also.