Saturday, February 2, 2013

Simplicity in design - friend or enemy?

I have a real soft spot for simple designs - minimalist if you will. The thing I love most about modelling and coding for games is the way the restrictions of the medium force you to omit information, and the way you can construct your design so that the omissions of this information don't detract from the user experience, but add to it. Kind of like when people listen to music to "hear the notes they don't play".

This impressionistic approach to design, wether that be for websites, games or a simple logo, can be a double edged sword. On one hand it means that there is less production work to bring your design to life since there is essentally less information to display, but it also requires a lot of thought and planning to go into the early design stages and sometimes during testing it can all fall down catastrophically. So is simplistic design better or worse than the traditional information spam approach?