“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” (Leonardo Da Vinci). I have this quote on my office wall and refer to it often during my day.

In a world where we seem to be constantly trying to complicate the uncomplicated, it’s often the simple things that work the best.

Take web design. Now I’m no expert – we have a great team of web designers here at ireckon who are brilliant at what they do – but as someone who has been online for a while now and has witnessed many a web design come out of ireckon, it is often the ‘simple’ sites that appeal to me. When I say simple I don’t mean the boring sites (not that we do boring at ireckon anyway!), but a site that has been designed to be easy to use and navigate, and fulfils all the functions it is supposed to.

In marketing we often use the KISS principle – keep it simple, stupid! I am often reminding myself of this when trying to come up with ideas for ireckon.com’s homepage ‘treatments’ we do, such as what we did on our site during the Olympics. Instead of making something complicated, it’s more often than not the simple things that work. My brief for the first week of the Olympics was “the background is to be blue, like a swimming pool, and use our exclamation mark to look like it’s diving into the water”. From that brief we got this:

I think it’s beautiful – simple yet so striking and clever (using the design of the Watercube as the background!) and fulfils what we were trying to achieve.

In everything I am trying to accomplish at ireckon, be it designing the systems, putting processes in place or coming up with marketing campaigns, I’m always looking at simplifying to get the best possible outcome for all without the need to complicate.

The same principles can be applied to life. The way we go about tasks, the way we interact with others, our daily work life, can all become so much easier if we do everything as simply as possible.

As Saint Exupery said, “Perfection is often achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”.

So when you next go to design something, find solutions to problems, or interact with others, try to remember that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication!