Resurgence magazine has in their online archive a delightful article summarizing wabi-sabi by Leonard Koren: A Culture of Simplicity. His book-length treatment of the subject is called Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers.
Wabi-sabi is a Japanese aesthetic and philosophy of simplicity, humility and naturalness. In the era of information anxiety, this sort of approach [...]
Don Norman is sick of hearing people talk about how Google is so simple. The truth about Google’s so-called “simplicity” is that “anybody can make a simple-looking interface if the system only does one thing”. But behind the search page, it’s not so simple after all:
If you want to do one of the many other [...]
plentyoffish.com and the role of anti-marketing design
Robert Scoble’s microsoft blog offers an interesting theory about simple (or ugly) design — that an un-designed site is somehow more appealing and makes more money. Sites like MySpace, Google, CraigsList are notoriously simple in design and also incredibly popular. Perhaps there is something about slick, designer-ish websites that [...]