Tip O’ The Day: Simple Is Best

By Elisabetta Bruno Posted on July 18, 2006 2 Comments

Today I was messing around with a page for a monthly magazine I design. It was supposed to be a quick thing—just a bunch of boxes with ads—but in my quest to make the page interesting, I got lost and I just couldn’t achieve a satisfying result, with my headache as accessory.

I kept changing things around, you know—this title doesn’t work, maybe I should add a line, I shall move this… Eventually I just sat back and thought, “That’s it, I am going back to simplicity.” I took off the background, some decorative lines and simply used colour to get what I wanted. The page looked much more sober and, most importantly, it worked.

It might be really tempting to do really complicated and cool things when you have powerful software, but sometimes simplicity is all it’s needed. You’ll also find the most clever design is often the simplest.