“Creating this website took longer than expected. It took way longer.” That was what I thought when I first clicked my way through pages that are now in front of you.
Initial ideas about creating a website emerged a few years back when my interest for graphic design was surpassing the a-website-to-show-my-stuff-would-be-nice threshold. I started by creating Photoshop mockups of how my ideal website should look like. Over time I had to learn that the meaning of the word “ideal” was not that easy to grasp.
No matter where we look at we are continuously exposed to an uncountable number of designs which in turn influence our conception of how something has to look like so that it feels natural and modern. This is why my “idea” of a perfect website slowly morphed over time. Sometimes everything got more complicated and a lot of details were added and sometimes all details and gimmicks were removed so that there was almost nothing left at the end. I think that this back and forth was a very important step in creating a product for which I am proud of to put my name on. In the end everything leveled off and I was left with the bare minimum that allowed all the functionality I wanted but also looked nice at the same time. Leaning back and looking a the result I came to think “Hmm… that looks quite obvious. Why didn’t I get that earlier?”.
That gut feeling allowed me to experience something very profound. The things that are obvious and clear – where you don’t have to think twice why something was designed in a certain way – where you instantly feel cozy – where you don’t need a 100 page manual in order to understand its meaning – are the things hardest to create. However, I think that those things will also last the longest. This probably applies to everything we do. If we do not pay extra attention during our creative thinking processes we often tend to unwillingly add complexity. Just because we can do something does not justify that we should. Saying “no” to features which in the end are only used by a minority of your users is the single most important thing everyone should do. Say “No, no.” and again “no”. We should only say “yes” to the things that represent the essence of what we want to achieve.
Amazing products are not conceived by saying “yes”. They are the result of saying “no” to a thousand things.