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What Miles Davis teaches you about simplicity

By Patrick Gant

Miles Davis was unhappy.

music creativity simplicity

“The music has gotten thick,” Davis said. “Guys give me tunes and they’re full of chords.”

It was a problem he was ready to solve.

He assembled a group of legendary musicians and over two sessions in March and April of 1959, they performed and recorded Kind of Blue.

The sessions featured almost no rehearsals. There was no sheet music.

Band members were given rough instructions on how each song was meant to be played, instead leaning heavily on melody and improvisation.

The results were stunning.

Kind of Blue remains one of the best selling jazz records and is pointed to by many music critics as one of the most influential recordings of all time.

Simplicity is commonly pointed to among the achievements of this important record.

It’s an accurate choice of words here. But I’m reminded of how often simplicity gets misused to describe the ambitions of a wide range of creative work.

Maybe you’ve heard some of these at a boardroom table before:

“Let’s build with simplicity in mind…”
“We need to simplify the steps required to use this product…”
“Don’t complicate: keep it simple…”

Simplicity is not a process.

It’s tempting to think of simplicity as the act of paring until you’re down to the bare essence of an idea, product or message.

In fact, that’s just good editing.

As Jony Ive, head of design at Apple reminds: “simplicity is not the absence of clutter.”

Sure, as far as writing is concerned, tighter ideas and economy of language are important. But it’s a mistake to assume there’s a process you can adopt to yield simplicity. It’s much more elemental than that.

Turning back to Kind of Blue, it succeeds in its “exquisite simplicity” (as Bill Evans calls it in the album’s liner notes), because Miles Davis started with a clear definition of a problem he wanted to solve.

More than just to music, this applies to all creative work.

And that leads me to my second point.

Simplicity is an outcome of deep understanding.

Early in my career, I padded my writing with lots of literary ornaments: dense paragraphs and plenty of five-dollar words.

Why? Because I lived in constant fear that I’d be found out as a fraud and that I’d have to return my writer’s licence to the Bureau of People Smarter Than Me.

I was half right. Without first having a deep understanding of the problem I’d been tasked with solving, I was regularly putting myself at risk of seeming to dumb things down, rather than finding the heart of an idea.

I still struggle with this, but I do so now at least with the conviction that I’ll study the heck out of my customer’s business problems first before I even attempt to solve them with strategy and prose.

Simplicity is preceded by mastery.

One reviewer in summing up Kind of Blue says how it “sounded different from the jazz that came before it. But what made it so great? The answer here is simple: the musicians.”

Too often, simplicity is thought of as the act of making things look easy. Or that its spareness comes from a kind of idleness.

Simplicity comes only after you’ve begun to exercise mastery of your skills.

Even then, it comes slowly.

Miles Davis explained it best:“You have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.”

As I see it, writing of all kinds can only start to achieve simplicity—satisfying simplicity—after you’ve dug deeply into your thoughts and have exhausted yourself by writing long form.

I don’t pretend to suggest I’m there yet.

But like you, I get closer, word by word.

How to do design (and how not to)

By Patrick Gant

With his usual aplomb, Marco Arment’s sage advice on design applies as much to platforms as it does to other products.

Good design is what you’re left with after you’ve said “no” to a lot of things.

How to bring good design to a platform

Demonstrate from the top that high quality and attention to detail are prioritized and appreciated above everything else, including being the first to market, having the most features, or having the most aggressive prices. If you can get those as well, that’s great, but quality will not be sacrificed to do so.
Instill these values in your staff. If you can’t, hire a staff for which you can. Better yet, hire a staff for which you don’t need to.
Aggressively pursue simplification, elegance, craftsmanship, and the highest-class user experiences in the product line. Ruthlessly cut or hold features or entire products that aren’t good enough.
Make it pretty.

How not to bring good design to a platform

Skip steps 1-3 above.

How you can improve your PowerPoint presentation today

By Patrick Gant

Slides1. Your Powerpoint or other slideware material shouldn’t compete with your presentation. Sounds obvious, right? But anyone who has had to squint to read all the copy on crammed onto dozens of slides in a presentation knows this mistake is still a common one.

2. When sharing data-based information with your audience, don’t just report on numbers. Explain the meaning behind numbers. Infographics and tastefully designed charts make a major impression and enlighten” in seconds.

3. Don’t cram your logo onto every slide. Ignore those who tell you that this age-old practice is all part of branding. It’s not. In a presentation, it’s just clutter. You’re on stage speaking directly to people. They know who you are already. What they don’t know yet is whether what you have to say is useful to them. That should be your #1 point of focus.

4. White space is your friend. Your audience will appreciate it more if you have more slides with less content on each page than just a few that are jam-packed and hard to read.

5. Always remember one of thinkit creative’s top rules about writing that sells: people are busy. You have less time than you think to attract and sustain the attention of your audience. So invest wisely in fine-tuning the design that drives your slides as well as the content that connects the value of who you are what you do with the needs of the people listening to what you have to say.

A new era in design

By Patrick Gant

The evidence is everywhere. We are entering a new era in design.

Today—more than at any other point in human history—more thought goes into the construction of things around us. That’s a development that has implications for everyone in the business of marketing to other people. In other words, everyone.

Today, design is about more than creating objects of beauty. It’s about creating ideas that are memorable, or an approach that strikes an emotional chord with people. It’s also about having better tools to understand and filter a world that’s cluttered with messages. Just as important, it’s about finding the right methods to execute those great ideas, approaches and tools.

You see it in consumer products that have a fit and finish once reserved for high-end scientific equipment. You see it in the way that some businesses set an example for others in the market by saying that consumer experience matters to them ahead of just selling more stuff.

You see it in self-published ebooks: an industry that once required a publishing firm just to get your foot in the door. You see it in the array of consumer apps developed for mobile users. You also see it in consumer signage that you see every day. Whereas we used to see material printed on paper and updated on a fairly slow cycle, today a lot of signage is being switched to LED and LCD monitors—products that cost a fraction of what they used to and that can be updated and tweaked regularly without incurring many of the expenses that saddled conventional marketing.

Design today is the sum of a million little things that, when added together, become something that connects with people on a deep, meaningful level. That doesn’t just mean that you need great visuals and colours that match. It means that visual elements and the written word have to bond closer than ever before so that audiences connect, understand and respond.

As a result, professionals who are skilled in design, strategy and content matter a lot. They can help you make better choices on developing your products, services and ideas so that messages are clear and purposeful. Just as important, they can show you through field-tested experience the right approaches to presenting those products, services or ideas.

They are brokers in good taste: and that’s something every business can benefit from having more of.

A history of title design

By Patrick Gant

History of title designLinked via kottke, a short movie on the history of title design in film. Succinct text, a well-chosen typeface and arresting visuals can tell a really compelling story. And that’s true of more media than just film.

I love that this clip closes with Enter The Void, which to my mind is the most outstanding title sequence in many, many years.

A Brief History of Title Design from Ian Albinson on Vimeo.

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