My favorite joke goes like this:
A skeleton walks into a bar and orders a beer and a mop.
Boom.
Every time I tell that joke, there’s always a pause while the listener waits for the punch line, and it’s during that pause that they actually hear it. The beauty of the beer-and-a-mop joke is that it’s been stripped down to the bare essentials. An elaborate setup wouldn’t make it any funnier.
Before I started designing, I thought I would be a writer. As a writer, I knew when a piece was done because I couldn’t take anything else out; every word had a purpose. What’s the bare minimum that I can include? A skeleton was walking down the street on a hot day … Superfluous, take it out.
I love designs that work the same way. One of my favorite artists, Charley Harper, used simple flat shapes and lines to depict a huge variety of birds and other animals in action. The fluttering of wings is distilled down to a series of lines rotated around a point. Charley called his style "minimal realism." He didn’t worry about how many feathers were on each wing. Instead, he captured the essence of his subjects by focusing on color and shape.
It’s such a satisfying feeling to see an illustration, a logo or a product that has just what I need to understand or use it and nothing more. Frilly details can be fun, but sometimes the most effective designs are the ones that have been stripped down to reveal their skeletons.