Everything is design. Everything! ― Paul Rand

I’m not exactly an impartial judge of this. As a self-learnt part-designer I always tend to look at things from an aesthetic perspective and it has always been a very important part of who I am and how I do things. Design, in it’s bare essentials help solve visual or physical problems. Whether it’s a website, car, new-pen or laptop – each of these have to be exquisitely designed and executed in a meaningful manner. If done right it’ll make customers fall in love with the product.

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the project, or service. – Steve Jobs

If you were to examine the competition of any business – Apple with Samsung or Microsoft and Facebook with Google Plus, however big or small we see that design is one of the main factors that sets them apart from each other. Yet, with all this we still see few businesses take design seriously. One way or another everything is designed, and if leveraged right it can be the only difference between a successful company like Apple and just another high-end computer manufacturer.

When someone says minimal, crispy-white designs the first thing that comes to my mind would be some product designed by Apple. Their success can easily be attributed to the fact that they’ve made design a core part of the companies strategy. Everything from the product (inside and out) to advertising and the launch is carefully planned out and designed. It’s no wonder people say they’d buy anything with an Apple logo etched onto it.

If you were to take a page from Apple’s book it’s that design should be used to make products easy to use. Making it easier for consumers to understand and use a product is a bare essential to designing anything. Let’s move onto a few more tips on The Complicated Process of Keeping it Simple.

You don’t always have to reinvent the wheel

Sometimes going out of your way to take a fresh and original approach to design could lead to something that consumers find unfriendly and unfamiliar. The best example of this is Facebook versus gPlus. While gPlus did take a fresh approach to the timeline and the whole interface, most people found it confusing and didn’t even consider making the switch. The Facebook user experience is something social networkers have gotten used to – designing similar user experiences for social products can actually increase the odds of success and the chance of them adopting your product/service. The same theory applies when designing other products; leverage on the experiences people already have.

Always go minimal

This is a two birds with one stone strategy; by keeping things minimal you automatically make the product more understandable and unobtrusive. Well, actually you could take down as many birds as you want if you just go the extra mile to make sure that it’s also designed to be long-lasting and a honest product (much easier since it’s minimal).

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works.- Steve Jobs

Keep focus

Always keep focus on the important elements in the product you’re designing. Medium.com is a very good example of this; they always focus on the content – have you noticed that the header menu only appears when scrolling up, and if not the whole window has complete focus on the blog text? This is what makes it such a compelling publishing tool for writers.

While keeping focus, design to the last details. Leave nothing to chance – flawless design equals fewer problems and happier consumers.

Color

Color is directly related to simplicity. In truth any choice of color can be used to create minimal designs – the defining factor is the number of colors being used and how they contrast each other. To me dark grey and pure white makes a perfect blend for minimal interfaces; for others it could be anything from black and white to red and blue. The important thing isn’t what colors you use – it’s about using as few as possible and taking advantage of contrast.

Fitting a whole user experience or product functions into a minimal design takes more planning than just sticking it in there without any respect to the design. It’s important to keep in mind that minimal doesn’t mean less work; truth be told it might be more work!

Addendum: Having said all that; try new things from time to time- you never know what does and doesn’t work until you really try it!