Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it’s manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.
What’s clear, and it’s been said before, is that there’s an opening for a new type of designer. Someone that understands interaction design, product design and can add character to things through behaviour. A light touch. Very subtle in order to make them believable – without them being too ridiculous.
I had a lovely time chatting with @JenSimmons, host of The Web Ahead podcast on the @5by5 network. We talked about interface design, working in design teams, and the joy and pain of critical feedback. Have a listen, won’t you?
We take our brand very seriously at MailChimp, not because we are hyper brand-nazis, but because our brand is our personality. It’s who we are as individuals and as a collective. We think a lot about how to convey our personality consistently while adapting to different contexts. MailChimp’s Content Curator, @katekiefer, has been pondering how to shape the MailChimp voice while adapting tone to the emotional state of readers. We have a lot of people writing for us, and guiding them into the voice of the brand can be tricky. That’s why we’ve created a simple little website that shows our writers how to use the MailChimp voice. It’s called Voice and Tone.
I recently spoke with A Book Apart editor Mandy Brown (@aworkinglibrary) about design, psychology, branding, and finding a place for emotional design in our professional workflow. Our conversation has been published in .net Magazine.
Nearly four years ago I stumbled onto a topic that I just can’t get off my mind. As we’ve started to share more of our personal lives online and the barriers of our public personas have begun to crumble, we’ve started speaking with a more authentic voice. The blurred line between personal and professional is starting to influence our expectations of the products and services we seek.
Psychologist Robert Plutchik’s research on emotion and its evolutionary origins provides fascinating insights and foundational theory for those of us exploring emotional design.
