Minimalist design in an attention deficit world – simple is beautiful

Simple is beautiful

In a world where consumers take in thousands of advertising messages per day and are more engaged with brands than ever, sometimes simplicity rules.

“Why do we assume that simple is good?” asks Jonathan Ive in the book Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. “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.”

Think different

Apple took advantage of minimalist design and is often looked to as the golden standard for design and aesthetics. It leaves us wondering why other brands leave their marketing so jumbled, cluttered, using multiple fonts, sizes, colors, angles, bunnies, flowers, waves, etc.?

In a world of short attention spans, we thought we would take a look at the minimalist movement as represented by the design project by Anthrepo4.com that reimagines international brands with minimalist design. The first set takes off the logo and transforms into Helvetica Neu Bold, and the second set is a simplified version of the original branding.

The designers ask, what is your choice in these 4 different variations?
1. Original variation
2. Simple variation
3. More simple variation
4. No logo variation

Minimalism with only Helvetica Neu Bold

Deconstructed package design

*Project number one and Project number two.