What does “Elegance Redefined” mean?
Elegance Redefined is not just our visual style guide, it’s also how we conduct our business. In contemporary English the word elegance enjoys two distinct but complementary meanings, the first is “a refined state of gracefulness and good taste.” And the other is “A state of neatness and ingenious simplicity in solving a problem.”
Now, the word “elegant” usually suggests many images: diamonds, fashion, art and certain people. But you generally don’t conjure up anything related to management. Yet there is an art to the management of ideas and the people who create them, and thus a role for elegance. So it becomes essential to redefine elegance.
Elegance is innate. It’s an attitude, it has nothing to do with mere appearances! You can learn to dress well or make things appear a certain way, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you also learn to be elegant. True elegance is a sense of balance or a constant habit of reconciliation of extremes.
Everything elegant is simple; not everything simple is elegant. That’s because there are two kinds of simplicity.
“I wouldn’t give a fig for simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for simplicity on the other side of complexity.”
– Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Elegance is “far side” simplicity that is emotionally engaging, profoundly intelligent, and artfully crafted to be two things at once: simple and powerful. It is simple but not bland, sophisticated but not complicated, audacious but not boastful.
The goal of elegance is to maximise the effect with minimum means. It’s an elusive target. Scientists, mathematicians, and engineers search for theories that explain highly complex phenomena in simple ways.
Artists use white, or “negative,” space to convey visual power. Musicians and composers use silence to create dramatic tension. Physicians try to find a single diagnosis to explain all of a patient’s symptoms, shaving the analysis down to the simplest explanation.,
As Jim Collins wrote in 2003 “A great piece of art is composed not just of what is in the final piece, but equally what is not. It is the discipline to discard what does not fit—to cut out what might have already cost days or even years of effort—that distinguishes the truly exceptional artist and marks the ideal piece of work, be it a symphony, a novel, a painting, a company, or most important of all, a life.”
What helps is to have a framework for applying four important design principles—symmetry, seduction, subtraction and singleness—for these are critical elements of elegance:
◆ Symmetry
◆ Seduction
◆ Subtraction
◆ Singleness
These are the 4-S of Elegance
Symmetry: Simple rules create effective order
Most people think about symmetry in terms of a mirror reflection, which is a visual left-right balance. But that’s just one example of a kind of symmetry, of which there are many. In fact, most of the natural world is symmetrical, characterized by infinitely repeating patterns.
So the best way to think about symmetry is the way Hermann Weyl defined it in his 1952 book, Symmetry: “A thing is symmetrical if there is something you can do to it so that after you have finished doing it, it looks the same as before.”
Symmetry is about the dynamic properties of ordering, organizing, and operating. And that places the concept in the manager’s world.
Seduction: limiting information creates intrigue
The power of suggestion is often stronger than that of full disclosure. Leaving something to the imagination, open to interpretation, creates an irresistible aura of mystery, and we are compelled to find answers. The seduction is in what we don’t know.
What we don’t know far outweighs what we do, and we are naturally curious. What isn’t there drives us to resolve our curiosity, and we will fill in the information we deem missing in order to do so.
Apple’s original iPhone strategy is a good example. In the months following its launch, the iPhone was hailed as one of the most-hyped products ever to hit the market. But to hype something means to push it heavily through the use of various sales and media tactics.
And that’s exactly the opposite of what Apple did. There were ads, but Steve Jobs’s simple 2007 MacWorld demonstration was the lynchpin. The spare design was coupled with a spare strategy. No appearances by Mr Jobs on television.
No sweeping demo model program for technology journalists. No advance reviews. No evangelistic outreach to the Apple cult. No special introductory offer or handset rebate. No preordering.
By the time the iPhone finally went on sale, 20 million Americans had expressed interest in buying one, regardless of the price or potential wait time. It was a well-executed seduction strategy, and the iPhone “tipped” well before it hit the market.
Subtraction: restraint and removal creates value
When neuroscientists examine brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), they notice that activities involving subtracting numbers light up an entirely different part of the brain than those involving addition.
Subtraction is indeed a different way of thinking. But the positive impact of a manager asking and answering questions like these is undeniable:
◆ What would my customers love for me to eliminate or reduce or stop adding?
◆ What is it that my competition would struggle with if I were to cease?
◆ What would my most highly valued people love for me to stop doing?
Facebook and YouTube are the world’s largest media companies and they practically create no media content. That’s the power of subtraction.
“Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub,
It is the centre hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel,
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room,
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there,
Usefulness from what is not there.”
– Lao Tzu
Singleness: your uniqueness helps you stand out
While Jacob’s law states “Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.”, being just like everyone else is not a good strategy.
Minimalism also plays an important role in this. When it comes to design, minimalism is good but not to the point of extreme reductionism where brands, whether companies or individuals start losing their personality.
Due to these two reasons if we look at a lot of websites and apps today they look just the same even the illustrations and headings are identical and I fear it might not be a good trend.
But if we make everything like everything else i.e. totally frictionless, things just go unnoticed and that’s a big problem in life, in relationships, in technology, whenever things start going unnoticed we stop appreciating them. And that’s where a majority of mental and emotional problems arise.
“When everything is exactly the same, a little different makes news, a little different brings you success, a little different stands out… It will really change how people perceive your brand.”
― Vitaly Friedman
One might ask “But what about speed?” However, Speed is a relative concept. Speed serves only as long as one individual has it but others don’t. If everything is moving at the same speed then all seems rather stagnant. And even when a lot is being no one has time to reflect upon what’s done and to enjoy it.
So sometimes it becomes necessary to introduce just a little bit of friction, in order to be noticed, to use the processes on the website to make people slow down and breathe deeply for just a li’l while.
And if we as individuals and businesses are not doing it, we are missing an opportunity to connect to other individuals on a deep human level and some of them may turn out to be potential customers. It is so indispensable to have a unique personality, to leave an impression, to be memorable, after all that’s what true elegance is all about.
As Giorgio Armani once said ‘Elegance is not about being noticed, it’s about being remembered’. Without personality the brand wouldn’t be a brand it would be just another replaceable commodity, consumers have no loyalty towards a commodity.