It's now available as an ebook on the MIT press portal http://mitpress-ebooks.mit.edu/produc...

A book to be read in a couple of hours.

Maeda writes about how simplicity influences our perception of things and how simplicity can be achieved in many different ways. He describes 10 laws to achieve simplicity:

Law 1: The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.
Law 2: Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.
Law 3: Savings in time feel like simplicity.
Law 4: Knowledge makes everything simpler.
Law 5: Simplicity and complexity need each other.
Law 6: What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral.
Law 7: More emotions are better than less.
Law 8: In simplicity we trust.
Law 9: Some things can never be made simple.
Law 10: Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.

The book has a companion site where Maeda wrote about examples of simplicity: http://lawsofsimplicity.com ( )

So great book. ( )

I definitely enjoyed this little book and recommend it. It is more of a short meditation on simplicity in technology and life than any kind of manual, but it is a good, rich little essay on this topic.

Some of the highlights of this book include:
* Removing and hiding features are counterbalanced by the need to make their quality tangible (including aerodynamic or streamlined design), in an act of emotional design.
* Melting elements into a blur can make them appear more simple in the gestalt, although there is a price to this in the learning curve.
* Put yourself in the shoes of the beginner to teach and learn the basics, repeating yourself.
* "Metaphors are only deeply engaging if they surprise along some unexpected, positive dimension."
* "Simplicity and complexity need each other": "find the right balance where you can become 'comfortably lost.'"
* "The taste of this meal is affected by the [pure white] room we sit in."
* And trust resides in how much you need to know about a system and how much the system knows about you.

The acronyms and so forth that show up through the book are fairly hokey, but he admits this as an unresolved flaw and reminds us of several important points in about 115 pages, culminating in the idea of "subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful." He also has a companion website at lawsofsimplicity.com where he occasionally posts other books, links, etc. As always, I would've liked sources for some of his anecdotes--this would be a form of his "openness simplifies complexity"--and since this is something I do not see on the website, I'm going to have to spend some time if I want to track any of them down.

Overall, this is a rich dessert. Highly recommended. ( )

In "The Laws of Simplicity" graphic designer, artist, computer scientist and professor at MIT, John Maeda, offers a cursory examination of simplicity in our technologically choked world. I say cursory because at 100 pages the book doesn't have much room for a "complex" examination of simplicity. I suppose John did this intentionally. Nevertheless, what I expected from the book and what I got were two different things.

I expected him to discuss his ten laws in ways that pertain to real life. Maybe he did this to some degree, but more often than not, when I finished a chapter, I was left wondering why he didn't finish the book, wondering why each chapter felt like an introduction to a chapter and not a fully realized chapter itself.

The ten laws are Reduce, Organize, Time, Learn, Differences, Context, Emotion, Trust, Failure and The One, which says we are to take away the obvious and add the meaningful. The ten laws are applicable to life. I only wished Maeda would have more closely followed law number ten. ( )