Elegant Design: A Designer’s Guide to Harnessing Aesthetics

Users want simple designs, but they also crave performance. More performance means more complexity. How can designers, inventors, and product managers handle this trade-off? How can they create designs that are quick to process as well as meaningful, unique, and memorable in an age characterized by constant information overload?

The answer is elegant design. Research insights at the intersection between cognitive science and art studies demonstrate that elegance is a form of ideal complexity sitting between the obvious and the complicated. The book shows how our minds can effectively process visual complexity by using aesthetic pleasure and judgment as a guide. Analyzing the work of great artists and designers from the perspective of how our mind appreciates complexity using aesthetic criteria, Elegant Design identifies actionable aesthetic strategies that will help you to design products and user experiences that provide just the right complexity leveraging aesthetic pleasure to deliver meaning and performance.
Four design strategies will help make your product more complex when it is too simple and boring. Another set of four strategies will help simplify your product when it is too complicated and confusing. By iterating between simplification and complexification, you can hit the ideal level of complexity, maximizing users' aesthetic pleasure.
Using the same approach in the book's writing, Luca Iandoli and Giuseppe Zollo will bring you on a pleasurable journey across art, design, and history through a beautifully crafted edition including more than 100 images, stories, case studies, provocative takeaways and exercises to stimulate creativity and aesthetic reasoning.

Luca Iandoli is Dean of the Collins College of Professional Studies and a professor in the Department of Computer Science at St. John's University. Luca was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and served as an associate professor at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy, and as visiting professor at Stevens Institute of Technology, USA. His research focuses on collective intelligence, interaction design, and product aesthetics.