Most poorly designed pieces have something in common; they’re too complicated and too busy. Too many fonts, too many photos, too many logos, too many colours. Just too much. Have a look at the majority of the award winning work that’s floating around—there are few fonts, few photos, few logo, few colours. Even the busy looking designs can be broken down into simple elements.

Design is about being able to convey a message, which is more often than not bundled with an emotion, in an effort to evoke a reaction in an audience. One of the truest maxims I’ve ever known is; if the message is interesting, if it has power and strength, then wrap it in a simple design—let the message do the heavy lifting, not your design. Let the audience discover the emotion or thoughts or connections themselves, let them fill in the gaps, rather than forcing something onto them.

Before we get too far into this, I’ll offer you a brief explanation as to how I came to the genesis of this article. While working on a piece about realism in illustration, I found something much more interesting. Recently, the team behind Family Guy put together a 40 minute retelling of the first Star Wars epic – A New Hope. While comparing the shots of the original film with their illustrated counterparts I realised there was a different kind of article burried in the 240+ stills from the movies I had put together – Blue Harvest, the Family Guy homage, was a well designed take on the original that with or without intention, demonstrated minimalism in an awfully fun way.

Why simple is good

More often than not, the reaction we are trying to provide, be it an emotion, thought or action, is complex and powerful. To make someone laugh, you wouldn’t have a routine that rivals Who’s on First? in length in your layout, would you? Instead, you’d use a single image, with a single tag line, that when combined will generate the reaction you are after – a smirk, giggle or hopefully, a fit of hysterical laughter. The audience will see the image and the line of text and relate it to an idea or experience they hold locked away in their memory, waiting to rise to the surface when triggered. The less there is on the page, the fewer of these memories there are trying to be remembered. A simple combination can deliver powerful results. A simple combination, a simple solution, means there is less to absorb and understand, that is, the easier it is to ‘get it’ now and the easier it is to remember down the track.

Recreating a mood

Take a look at the following shots. The opening to A New Hope is something that everyone vividly remembers experiencing for the first time. An enormous, technological marvel passes over the audience, belittling a moon and surface of a planet as it menacingly chases it’s victim. This mammoth ship is light-years ahead of anything that we can fathom—it’s awe inspiring. It is this that the illustrators of Blue Harvest wanted to recapture. This feeling of awe and of shock. When it was first seen back in the day, it’s complexity was phenomenal, it was like nothing seen before. However as time has gone on, it has became less phenomenal in the world of Science Fiction. So the artists of Blue Harvest had to do what they could, to recreate that initial feeling of awe. So they added detail, more detail than the original. More lights, more compartments, more gidgets, more gadgets. Each one simple in its self, adding up to a more complicated whole.