The ten laws are:

1. REDUCE - The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction
2. ORGANIZE - Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.
3. TIME - Savings in time feel like simplicity.
4. LEARN - Knowledge makes everything simpler.
5. DIFFERENCES - Simplicity and complexity need each other.
6. CONTEXT - What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral.
7. EMOTION - More emotions are better than less.
8. TRUST - In Simplicity we trust.
9. FAILURE - Some things can never be made simple.
10. THE ONE - Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.

There's a profound statement hidden on page 70: "While great art makes you wonder, great design makes things clear." So well put. The author is a graphic designer, but I think this thought applies to product design, and even process design.

The poet William Wordsworth once wrote, "The world is too much with us." If this was true in the bucolic 18th and 19th centuries when Wordsworth lived, it is even more true today, when every gadget comes with an incomprehensible 100-page instruction manual. Thus, simplifying people's lives with your products and services is a surefire path to business success; it will endear you to your customers forever. In this aphoristic little book, graphic designer John Maeda has distilled all he knows about simplicity into 10 laws and three key ideas. He sprinkles mnemonics, icons and graphics throughout, which you may enjoy if you're a visual learner or find baffling if you're not. If you really like the icons, you can download them from the Web site Maeda put together to complement the book. getAbstract recommends this work particularly to marketing people, product designers and technical writers. Maybe some day your mother won't have to call you every time she wants to record Jeopardy.

If you manage your expectations, this little book can be pleasant, even delightful. But if your interest is for more serious, robust exploration, then look elsewhere.

The title is a bit misleading. The term "Laws" suggest principles that can be universally applied and have been rigorously tested. This book is really more of a set of loosely connected essays about design approaches. The insights are often good, and perhaps helpful, but "laws" they are not. A title like "Reflections on Simplicity in Design" would have been more accurate, and I would have awarded a fourth star if it had been titled more appropriately.

This is really more of a short philosophy book about design, rather than a treatise offering Newtonian-scale laws. But that criticism now made, can this little book be inspiring? Sure.
Is the book overwrought and under-thought? A little.
Does it offer deep exploration? Not really.
Is "Simplicity" a good introduction to the notion of simplicity in design? Yes, up to a point.

One reviewer lamented that "Simplicity" has about the same depth as a dinner conversation. I agree, although that's no reason to think that level of depth is pointless. If it inspires and offers fresh perspectives on old problems, then that can have it's own value. And that's what "Simplicity" offers, but not much more.

Just don't pin your hopes on this offering fundamental design principles; instead use it as a loose collection of design approaches (supported only by brief anecdotes). I'd give it 3.5 starts if I could, the half star being awarded for brevity (but not laws or simplicity itself).

The best thing about this book is that it stayed SIMPLE.

It is a quick read, and a good reference source for anyone in the field of design.

Almost immediately after I began to read this book, I was reminded of two quotations, the first from Oliver Wendell Holmes: "I do not care a fig for simplicity this side of complexity but I would give my life for the other side of complexity." Also from Albert Einstein: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." Further along into John Maeda's discussion of each of the ten "laws" and his explanation of why he thinks that "simplicity = sanity," I was reminded of this passage from William Butler Yeats' "The Second Coming":

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

Holmes was right, acknowledging how difficult it is to proceed through complexity to simplicity. In fact, I view complexity in that context as a crucible. More specifically, as container into which alchemists once placed raw materials and subjected them to intense heat, hoping to produce a pure and precious metal, perhaps gold. Like the falcon in Yeats's poem, the human mind circles high above more than it can possibly absorb and process, then make sense of. This is what William Wordsworth suggests in "The World Is Too Much with Us":

"The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!"

And this is why Maeda believes that "simplicity = sanity." In a world that seems to become more complex each day, his on-going journey of discovery he realized how complex a topic simplicity really is, "and I don't pretend to have solved the puzzle...[and] am inspired to grapple with this puzzle many more years...Like all man-made `laws' [mine] do not exist in the absolute sense - to break them is no sin. However you may find them useful in your own search for simplicity (and sanity) in design, technology, business, and life."

It would be a disservice to Maeda as well as to those who read this review to list the ten "Laws." They are best revealed in context, within the frame-of-reference he creates for each. The same is true of the three "Keys to achieving simplicity in the technology domain" with which Maeda concludes his narrative. "Rarely do I have answers, but instead I have a lot of questions just like you." I am amazed by how much material he provides within only 100 pages. Additional resources can be obtained (at no cost) by visiting lawsofsimplicity.com.

It is worth noting that when Maeda "set out with youthful zeal to attack the simplicity question, [he] felt that complexity was destroying our world and had to be stopped!" Presumably others have experienced the same frustrations I have encountered when struggling to understand the directions provided in an operations manual or terms and conditions of a service warranty or when struggling to obtain assistance from a customer service representative who speaks slowly enough and clearly enough to be understood. Why does it have to be so (bleeping) complicated? After speaking at a conference, Maeda was approached by a 73-year old artist who took him aside and said, "The world's [begin italics] always [end italics] been falling apart. So relax." Maeda suggests that his reader take the same advice "and try to LEAN BACK while you read this book, if you can."

John Maeda may not get you to the "other side of complexity" but he can help you to preserve your sanity meanwhile. If that isn't a value-added benefit, I don't know what one is.

I am a self-confessed computer geek; I have programmed for pay in four languages, taught programming in twelve different languages and have been the instructor for nearly every course in our undergraduate computer science major. Yet, I am constantly frustrated by the electronic devices that I encounter. The remote for my cable box has a terrifying number of buttons, and occasionally some must be pressed in sequence. My small video recorder has only a few buttons, which means that operations almost always require a sequence to be pressed.
In the first case, the attempt to make everything simple has introduced the increased complexity of a large number of buttons and in the second case the attempt to make things simpler has introduced the complexity of sequential actions. Neither one works for me and I am hardly unique.
Maeda puts forward a program designed to introduce true simplicity into the world of human-technological interactions. He starts with what he calls Shrink, Hide, Embody (SHE) and describes 10 laws of simplicity. They are:

*) Reduce - the simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction
*) Organize - organization makes a system of many appear fewer
*) Time - savings in time feel like simplicity
*) Learn - knowledge makes everything simpler
*) Differences - simplicity and complexity need each other
*) Context - what lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral
*) Emotion - more emotions are better than less
*) Trust - in simplicity we trust
*) Failure - some things can never be made simple
*) The One - simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful

As the power of technology increases, the human ability to comprehend it decreases. With this reduced comprehension there is a need for simpler and more effective control mechanisms and the ways to do that is the theme of this book. The author is very effective in demonstrating ways to reduce the complexity to the point where it can be managed.
Like most people in information technology (IT) my life his hectic and cluttered. I applied some of the ideas in this book to reduce the clutter in my office by about 30% and will start on the work area of my house this weekend after the commencement exercises. The next time I teach computer interface design; this book will be a required supplement and the students will be required to read it before they move into the area of building a complex user interface.

I had an opportunity to hear John Maeda speak recently. Here are a few things John said that I really like: "Humans want 'more' (food, storage, stuff). So 'more' is an important marketing concept. But while humans want more, design is about less. Yahoo design is about more. Google design is about less."

I ordered "The Laws of Simplicity" even before his speech was done. It is a short book and I read it in one sitting this weekend. II really enjoyed it. My favorite is Law ten: "Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful."

I am not a designer. Instead I write and speak about marketing. While John writes about simplicity as it relates to design, I am convinced that the same things apply to marketing and PR. For example, marketers love to use big gobbledygook words when they write - things like "mission critical" and "next generation". But simplicity of language is what sells. So I am recommending Laws of Simplicity for marketers too.

John Maeda is a genius and this book is simple but very profound. A must have for any graphic designer - but you can apply these principles in your everyday life as well!

Meada set the limit to 100 pages, and I cherish authors who don't waste my time, but I expected a book about how to apply more "simplicity thinking" in my life and work. Laws of Simplicty contains a lot of nuggets, but in no order or structure; design principles, tributes to Maeda's mentors, thoughts about design and products, and small anecdotes.

The design principles of simplicity presented are:
- Reduce and make design specific, as said best by Antoine De Saint-Exupery:
"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
- Organize information visually to reduce clutter - "squint when evaluating a design".
- Use people's background knowledge to accelerate the learning curve
- Make the wait of services more pleasant if the wait can't be made shorter
- Usable and simple are nice, but playful and beautiful are as important

Read the book in you want to think about the above, but not if you expect it to give you any answers.

I was predisposed to dislike this book. The only (self-identifying) MIT alumnus I've ever met who WASN'T a self-important blow-hard is my brother-in-law; the rest have reinforced the stereotype. But Maeda actually uses his (AMPLE) sense of self-importance as a motivator for this book.

First thought on hearing of the book: "Simplicity? It'd better be a SHORT book!" It is. Points earned.

Second thought, on looking up Maeda on the web: "Boy, he really thinks he's GOD'S GIFT to graphics programming!" In the book's intro, he actually apologizes for all the dancing baloney users have had to put up with, thanks (in small PART, not entirely) to his efforts. Nice move, sir.

The chapters on principles are engaging, well-explained, and were immediately applicable to some of my larger work challenges. Can't say all those things about many of the technical process or "how to think about stuff" books I've read...

In the end, I bought copies of this book for my entire product team, in the hopes that it would inform their thinking throughout our development cycle.

Well worth reading, your prior experiences with self-important MIT blowhards notwithstanding. :)

Este es un libro muy ameno, donde el diseñador gráfico John Maeda explica las leyes de la simplicidad. Este libro es de muy fácil lectura y está complementado con muchas anecdotas del autor. Un libro recomendable.

Marcos Chilet
Diseño, Pontifica universidad Católica de Chile.

I am still reading it but i can say for sure that is a awesome book from an awesome thinker, definitely worth the money.

For a book nominally on simplicity, John Meada's Laws of Simplicity isn't very simple. It is full of supposedly mnemonic acronyms that are impossible to remember. These give his writing a forced feel, since he's beholden to the acronym, rather than the essence of what he's trying to get across. In chapter 4 he reflects that by now, the reader has tired of the acronyms - but he got it wrong - they were tiresome from the start. Some of the concepts are interesting, but they are lost in autobiographical forays, bad metaphors and similes.

The chapter on learning is a good example of what's wrong about the work. He is supposedly talking about learning in the context of simplicity - that knowledge makes any task seem simple. But he only spends one or two paragraphs exploring this - the rest of the chapter is about how best to learn - which is not what I thought the point was. There are entire libraries about how to learn. What was interesting was the suggestion that you can't have a sense of simplicity without the context of prior knowledge. Why did he come up with that only to abandon it?

There's a lack of Gestalt (which is ironic, because he describes this concept early on) and the book comes off as a loose collection of thoughts forced into relation to each other. Either the book should be totally rewritten (can the real book about simplicity please stand up?) or it should be re-purposed into "A Collection Of John Meada's Random Thoughts: Some Of Them On Simplicity".

The author does mention some of these flaws himself in chapter 9 - "Failure". He felt it was important to release the book now even though it was far from perfect. I disagree - this book isn't even half-baked. He also admits this was the first book he had written more than designed.

Simplicity is elegance - nothing extra - nothing getting in the way. This book needs to be boiled down and reduced further. More meat less fluff. No doubt John Meada is a great designer and thinker. The Laws of Simplicity fails to convey the author's knowledge.

This book discusses simplicity (and its support) to the depth of a
dinnertime conversation with friends. It's shallow, but that is
not the worst of it, which is that it's sophomoric (at times painfully
so). The silly acronyms, which are not meaningfully related to anything
elsewhere in the book, do little to dispel this view.

This book discusses simplicity (and its support) to the depth of a
dinnertime conversation with friends. It's shallow, but that is
not the worst of it, which is that it's sophomoric (at times painfully
so). The silly acronyms, which are not meaningfully related to anything
elsewhere in the book, do little to dispel this view.

The simplest as you can find , It can be useful tool for every designer , but importantly for everyone of us in a daily life

In the spirit of the book:
1. Apply to software, web, graphic design.
2. Gift to your user, then ask for feedback on your system.
3. Repeat ...

I've tried loaning this book out, however I never get it back, (I'm reminded that only your friends steal your books).

If you have a copy of Tufte's books, (Beautiful Evidence or The Visual Display of Quantitative Information), this text is a perfect balance.

As much as I enjoyed this book I felt the author's use of TLA's failed in his purpose to work as a mnemonic device.

Even though I submitted the book as work-related expense, I woefully regret spending $20 on the rambling musings of Mr. Maeda. How this guy got a chair at MIT is anyone's guess. His fascination with words within words was infantile ... look, "MIT" is in "simplicity" -- ah. I feel sorry for his students, and plan this to be my last MIT Press book -- ever. Complete waste of time.

Very enlightening reading. He is a humble person with great vision and philosophy. My boss ordered it to be distributed to 10 liberal arts professors who teach art and design students at Ringling College of Art and Design. Definitely recommend it.

I want my money back. When I buy a book called THE LAWS OF SIMPLICITY, written by a university professor I expect more than this! John Maeda simply does not deliver.
The first two laws I could appreciate. Even though they are not new, they deserve a place. But from then on it's disappointing. "3: Savings in time feel like simplicity". Well, duh. "5: Simplicity and complexity need each other" Shameless!
And then there are statements that are simply wrong, e.g. "Simple objects are easier and less expensive to produce" (page 62). That's obviously not true in general.
I had hoped that this book contained some universal laws about simplicity, applicable to e.g. life in general and software applications in particular. No such luck.
I am grateful to the reviewer who recommended "Universal Principles of Design." That book was (and is) very helpful in my profession.

What's the opposite of this hopeful and ultimately illusory concept of simplicity? On one side we have complete order and on the other we have complete disorder (yes, with small variations). There are aesthetic conquences for these polar opposites. I find a specific complexity in the middle. Is simplicity qualitative - do we find levels of simplicity or does it begin and end at well defined intervals. Where is this "simple" space? Is simplicity another word for edited, reduced, a trimming of the non essential - isn't this a dangerous line? And isn't simplicity "simply" for the sake of expediency, efficiency of living with rounded corner lives? What a hopeful and anachronistic suggestion. This is perfect for product, capitalism, selling janky vacations to the working class, drug companies and soda pop rivalries. I just received a free disposable camera for filling out a quick survey!

Quote me here: We call for a SPECIFIC COMPLEXITY for our culture, our images, experiences and our relationships. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention and what is invention? It is elaboration from an existing pattern - a specific complexity born as novelty. When necessity is gone, invention and it's novel offspring look to culture, use, and its internal workings to remain relevant. Novelty changes, evolves, it adapts until it is no longer recognizable by the many, until it welds itself into the pattern. Where is simplicity but as an afterthought in our socio-cultural taxonomy?

"Necessity is the mother of Invention, and, as everybody knows, a skinny woman named Poverty is the mother of Necessity. Necessity is gritted teeth and a rusty helmet of hair. Invention is a real shock -- she's beautiful, sleek and lively, eyes the color of sky. Necessity can hardly believe this girl belongs to her. Sometimes it seems Invention doubts it, too. She's forever looking beyond Necessity, over her shoulder, for someone else more plausible. Necessity doesn't want her daughter to leave her, though she knows that's what daughters often do." -[...]

Buy this book to be inspired from the Simplicity point of view. Not rated with 5 stars, add this one yourself!

In the spirit of the book: useful, makes objectives more right, simple book too. Pay attention, move on.

I heard the author (John Maeda) on a radio interview and I was intrigued by the things he had to say... This book is an essential guide for anyone interested in reducing clutter in their life, business and home.

I can't recommend this book strongly enough.

I found the laws themselves to be thought provoking; my mind immediately engaged the task of relating the laws to my own work. While the laws themselves are a delicious reduction the text itself is just the opposite. With such a dogmatic title strapped to a compact book I expected Maeda to directly confront on the topic of simplicity in a brief yet concrete manner (similar to how William Strunk hits the target dead on with The Elements of Style). Instead Maeda only lightly probes "simplicity" with lots of personal anecdotes, abstract thoughts and the iPod (for most examples). The book is more of a meditation on the topic than a "law" book.

I highly recommend reviewing the laws at John Maeda's site: [...] and consider doing your own meditations. Read the book only if you're interested in viewing the cogs turning in the mind of Maeda without them producing the condensed sweetness you might expect in such a compact tome.

(The hardcover book itself is nicely designed, printed and bound for those of you interested in good quality book and a favorable price.)

Rather than listing products to organize your laundry room, this lovely book treats simplicity as a philosophical inquiry. And it does not fall into the voluntary simplicity movement (although those who adhere to that will be enchanted). It's more a meditation using his brilliant background as an artist, engineer, student, and professor. The book is short and thoroughly inspirational. I highly recommend this delightful read.

It's a good book ... the topic is really interesting but i had much more expectation around this book.

I really enjoyed this book. I have been struggling with simplicity for a while both in my own life and trying to teach and advocate it in HCI and Software Architecture and Design classes. This book will definitely become required reading for these courses. It is well written, entertaining and provides insight into a not so simple subject. It also provides a bit of insight (I wish there was more) into general design.

I couldn't understand his own world of simplicity.
not really original as much as I expected.

The book was enjoyable to read, but not as quantitative as I had hoped. My daughter has read it to help her to redesign her website.
In 1967 I wrote: Just as we say that a straight line is the shortest connection between its end points, we may also say that a straight line is the simplest of all possible connections between its end points...
There seems to be a minimax quality associated with extreme simplicity.
We seek the minimal complexity consistent with satisfying the maximum numer of imposed constraints.
Perhaps looking for universal quantitative laws is unreasonable.

Many useful ideas you may have not crossed before or not from this view. Interesting points. Fusing business with philosphy. Great.

Look, He's an artist at MIT. That's like being a gardener at the Vatican. People around him are building robots to explore uranus and he's drawing spirals.
He obviously has no science background and his artistic credentials are questionable.
His English, on the other hand, is atrocious. Apparently it's not his first language but the editors could have done a better job correcting him.

I'll try to keep it simple.
The Great: The length - 100 pages. The size: perfect. The feel: well-designed and reader friendly. Has the feel of a book you can read in one sitting. And, you can!
Greatest: The philosophical content. It does not dumb down to make everything simple or preach the elimination of complication. It's comfortable with ambiguity. That's realistic and wonderfully clear.
The Good: Acronym overload - the author even admits it. Some of the first laws have accompanying mnemonic devices such as SHE: (Shrink, Hide, Embody) or HER (Hide Embody, Remove.) Interesting but not all that helpful.
Also good - the personal nature of the writing. Lots of personal, anecdotal experience - with kids and students and growing up - enhance the humanity and engagement with the subject matter.
The illustrations - often quite interesting. It makes sense that the author is a visual artist, and it must have taken some personal discipline to focus on text and not on images. But, when the images appear (sparely) they enhance the text in non-verbal ways.
The weak: What's with the cover? Seems like the opposite of simplicity. The metallic ink, the swirling vortext. Weird, and Weak.
I look forward to other books in this series on Simplicity from MIT Press.

I'll try to keep it simple.
The Great: The length - 100 pages. The size: perfect. The feel: well-designed and reader friendly. Has the feel of a book you can read in one sitting. And, you can!
Greatest: The philosophical content. It does not dumb down to make everything simple or preach the elimination of complication. It's comfortable with ambiguity. That's realistic and wonderfully clear.
The Good: Acronym overload - the author even admits it. Some of the first laws have accompanying mnemonic devices such as SHE: (Shrink, Hide, Embody) or HER (Hide Embody, Remove.) Interesting but not all that helpful.
Also good - the personal nature of the writing. Lots of personal, anecdotal experience - with kids and students and growing up - enhance the humanity and engagement with the subject matter.
The illustrations - often quite interesting. It makes sense that the author is a visual artist, and it must have taken some personal discipline to focus on text and not on images. But, when the images appear (sparely) they enhance the text in non-verbal ways.
The weak: What's with the cover? Seems like the opposite of simplicity. The metallic ink, the swirling vortext. Weird, and Weak.
I look forward to other books in this series on Simplicity from MIT Press.

This is a book that applies rules of design into an environment of new technology and dynamic interactions, it gives the reader the understanding of data organization in the day to day basis, and the application of that understanding into more complex systems.

The book is OK, but not brilliantly elegant. If you are looking for a between the eyes shot of design elegance like Tufte skip it. Better to try out the book (universal principals of design).

Simplicity is a single design constraint and objective many other considerations should be put in mind. Again buy the universal principals of design or a great expensive, but great book from Nokia on design UI's. The phone is the ultimate constrained design environment for software.

If you have not read anything on this topic, it may be a good starting point: it is very brief and readable. But if you have read something or even thought about the topic, you will be disappointed. This book aims at the teenage level.

Maeda gives 10 laws (rules of thumb) for simplicity, some of which have nothing to do with simplicity. But it all boils down to #10: "Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful". Hardly a new idea worth writing about.

Another idea is to organize lists of items in tables (Ch. 2). Come on!

Maeda abuses acronyms that serve no purpose: SHE, BRAIN, SLIP but annoy the reader. He acknowledges he got help to write and revise the book but his helpers did a poor job. In Ch. 5 Meade states: "Nobody wants to eat only desert [...] By the same token, nobody wants to have only simplicity". The crown is the sentence (p. 95): "We wear out as humans, so it's only fair and natural that batteries should wear out too". If you cannot find where the nonsense lies in that sentence, you may enjoy the book.

i've been familiar with maeda's work for about three years, and have worked with design by numbers. i love his visual style and methodology, and this book reads like it was written by a designer, rather than an academic. it's a condensation of ideas from donald norman and information aesthetics, and if you're looking for a substantial amount of text clarifying design theory, this will not do that. it is more of an artist's book. one negative aspect is the use of acrononyms, which confuses rather than clarifies. but other than that, this short collection of wise observations will help make your life simpler, if you are ready for it.

John Maeda's The Laws of Simplicity is a useful tonic to our current more-is-more world. Many people are bothered by the growing complexity of our tools, our relationships, and our environments. I know I am. Since moving to Boston earlier this year I have managed to get along happily in a much simpler way. I have not bought a car, Zipcars and a bicycle work just fine, I ride a fixed gear bike with a steel frame, and I live in a small apartment filled with natural light. As a result I have more time to read and to walk, and to think about how to make my job simpler!

I first noticed John Maeda's work at some point in the 1990s when his experiments with interactive type were popular among certain circles engaged in interactive media, especially in Japan, a country that I visit frequently and where the dance of simple to complex and back is almost a religion, especially in arts like the tea ceremony (Maeda references a tea ceremony in this book). (I am not sure that the preceding sentence is simple, and perhaps I should just press UNDO - Maeda also points out the way that the UNDO function in modern software can simplify our lives.) I have followed its development with some interest over the past decade, but this is the first work since those early experiments that has really spoken to me.

In The Laws of Simplicity he proposes ten laws, more like heuristics than laws, that can help one simplify a software application, any device, a production system, or even a business, a community, a life. The laws are well described in the book and on the website lawsofsimplicty.com, so I will not repeat them here. Instead, go ahead and invest a few hours in this useful little work, which has more thought and experience than its slim length would suggest.

There was one part of the book that disappointed. In the first law, Reduce, Maeda proposes an approach based on Shed, Hide, Embody. I was immediately intrigued by Embody, but let down when I found that it meant to complement simplification by embodying a perception of value in the object or experience. This may well be important, but I suspect there is a more important way to apply 'embody' to simplification. For example, if I had to think about how to walk (or how to move my fingers while I type these words) I would stumble or at best have to concentrate on the action and not the result. But walking has been deeply coded into my body - from muscle to and skin stretching, to nerves and the complex balancing in my cerebellum. Even my inner ear gets involved. Things are made simple when 'action' (and its complement 'decision' are embodied into their design. One of Maeda's favorite examples, the Apple iPod, is a good example. The functions of search, select, play are embodied in the control disk. Or going back to my fixed gear, the ability to brake is getting embodied into the system of gear and my thighs.



The Laws of Simplicity would also be easier to apply if the connections between the different laws were spelt out. As a simple example, Maeda's Sort - Label - Integrate - Prioritize (SLIP for short) is a good way to understand how web services work to make enterprise systems simpler. And this connects directly to the key of Open. There are many other such interplays, and learning how to make this sort of relationship simple is a key as we go forward into a world of more open and connected systems.

John Maeda's Laws of Simplicity shows us that sophistication and complexity are very different things. Mr. Maeda does not represent simplicity as the only true way but he makes a great case for consciously eliminating the excessive and unnecessary. This book provides a great framework for those who wish to put more Simplicity into their lives.

Our lives are becoming more complex and difficult to manage. Simplicity cuts through the thick of it and drives the idea of 10 Simple Rules to understand how to do it. John Maeda, provides a roadmap for simple principles that helps with molding new ways to approach complex business decisions. This is a great read for those who wish to rethink their Innovative approaches!

Maeda asserts the point of view that the foundation of simplicity is the most important thing to build anything upon it, and I have to agree with that. The book is unearthing the core of what matters the most in bringing the sanity back to the world that's becoming more complicated everyday. It's an enormous task to untangle the invisible mess, but I'm looking forward to the more practical development based on Maeda's thought-stream that was presented in a Zen-fashion.

I was really hoping for a new approach or perspective. This author has managed to take a promising subject and mollest it by going on about loosely connected factoids and trying to make them sound somewhat academic just to be published. I challenge anyone who has read this book to come up with a coherent idea of any new thought presented in it.

Well organized, methodical and common sense but nothing really exciting or insightful

I agree with the other reviewer: The dust jacket of this book is a very creative design. The content however is disappointing. The ideas (read: bullet point-level detail) that Maeda begins to talk about show promise. However, he never describes them in sufficient detail for the reader to know what was going on inside his head. The goal of the book is worthy: To boil down simplicity to a few key law-like generalizations. But the book itself does not demonstrate that. Instead, the book is a good example of how too much simplicity can also be undesirable. Perhaps the author was fixated on producing a short 100 page book. Perhaps he assumed too much prior knowledge of his typical readers (or perhaps assumed familiarity with his papers)? The book reminds me of the quote by some famous person (Einstien, I think): Make things just as simple as they need to be, but not simpler." This pretty book is an example of the truth in that statement. I hope that a future book by this author will leave where this one abruptly left off. If you must buy it, borrow it from your library first.

John Maeda is a super bright guy, but, like many academics, he's not good at writing. Do not spend your money on this.

The goal of the book is extremely worthwhile: to promote simplicity. It tries to do so in a small book, about 100 pages in small sized pages. Unfortunately it fails, it does not use it own lessons and presents a complicated description of "Simplicity". In order to simplify, it (ab)uses acronyms that do not elicit the thoughts that are intended. For instance, take SHE (Simplify, Hide, Embody). Using the word SHE is hard to turn your mind to "Simplify, Hide, Embody". Then there is BRAIN (Basics, Repeat, Avoid, Inspire, Never) and SLIP (Sort, Label, Integrate, Prioritize). Simple? To present the ideas, Maeda uses a random collection of recollections, of anecdotes, of circumstantial evidence, organized around ten laws, to illustrate the points it wants to make. As you read, you can find another anecdote from your own life, another experience that can contradict his conclusion. Not all is negative, there are some gems that make the reading worthwhile. For instance, law 10, or "the one": "Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful". Imagine if presentations in meetings, conversations or written reports were to keep this law, how more productive our lives would be. This is my simplified review!