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Reviewer: Christopher Fox

John Maeda is a renowned graphic artist and MIT professor who is a principle investigator in a long-term project at the MIT Media Lab studying simplicity and its application in communication, healthcare, and play. This book is the first in a series intended to disseminate the findings of Maeda and others about simplicity. This small volume is hardbound in dark blue with bright lemon-yellow endpapers. The main text is 100 pages composed of ten chapters (one for each of ten laws) and an epilogue. Each chapter has an opening graphic representing a law. There is also a very short list of references (none about simplicity), a list of ten laws and three keys, and a two-page index. I dwell on the design of the book because it is by far its best feature. The most surprising thing about the text is how little it has to say about simplicity. Most chapters relate personal vignettes, recount well-known facts, or present standard principles in graphic design, often with no essential connection to simplicity. These discussions flow from the laws stated in each chapter through a loose association of ideas that do little to illuminate the main concept of the book. The “laws” themselves usually mention simplicity, but are often trite (Law 9: Some things can never be made simple) or unintelligible (Law 6: What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral). The laws are not proposed as distillations from thoughtful consideration of what others have said about simplicity, from philosophical arguments about concepts, or from experiment. They seem to be aphorisms capturing some aspect of the author’s attitudes about life, graphic design, teaching, and so forth. Surprisingly, the sizable literature about simplicity and complexity is never alluded to. Perhaps this explains why fundamental and crucial distinctions among uses of the word “simplicity” to mean elegance, parsimony, or ease of use are so thoroughly confused, why fundamental questions about simplicity are never posed, and why, in the end, the discussion does not advance our understanding of the nature of simplicity at all. All design disciplines have basic principles in common (for example, simpler designs are better), so one might expect that an investigation of simplicity in graphic design and business would have far-reaching consequences for computer scientists interested in software design and human-computer interaction design. But if this volume is any indication, graphic designers have far more to learn about simplicity from computer scientists (and even more from philosophers) than the other way around. Online Computing Reviews Service