Beautiful Complexity is Persuasive
#4 Productize Philosophy
Hi, everyone.
From a completely unscheduled life, the weekly newsletter is organizing my life around itself. It is a sufficient structure that gets me to explore enough things to be able to write a letter about, and it puts more things I want to create on a schedule. As a self-improvement/productivity exercise, send an E-Mail capturing your week every Sunday to your peers and loved ones. You'll be surprised by how it'll orient your network, thoughts and day.
In the previous two letters, I talked about the minimal approach for giving products timeless Form, and first principles approach to lend the most effective Function to products. Today, I will talk about how Form relates with Function.
Beauty as a Focal Lens to Curiosity
Beauty effectively captures your attention and retains it. When you first come across something beautiful, that's how you know. Maria Popova wrote the book Figuring to capture the curiosity spirit of humanity through centuries. In it, she remarks,
“Beauty magnetizes curiosity and wonder, beckoning us to discover—in the literal sense, to uncover and unconceal—what lies beneath the surface."
In my industry of consumer technology, few understood this better than Steve Jobs. No one company is as responsible for the democratisation of personal computers over the last 4 decades as much as Apple. Before the movement began in that garage in the late 70s, computers seemed as alien to virtually everyone then as it seems only to probably your grand-parents now. To invite everyone to be digitally literate, Apple spearheaded a vision around consumer experience that begins with the first sight at a product. A user must be attracted and made known, all at once. And then stimulate endless conversations to carry persistent explorations among us.
We must keep arriving at new possibilities.
It is the form of a technology that inspires how a user leverages it’s function.
📝Beautiful Complexity is Persuasive
One night, at about 2AM, I complained at Kunal Shah for making a confusing-the-heck-of-someone UI for his product CRED.
(Kunal Shah?)
He astounded me when he revealed that that complexity was intentionally introduced to create a cult-like allegiance around his product. I wrote this essay to explain why & how.
Making Product Designs Intentionally Complex
🎨Art Appreciation
Picasso’s Bull has greatly inspired Apple’s design approach, and leaves an important understanding of creativity. In it, Picasso aims to capture the "essence" of his favorite animal, the Bull. As David Perell explains:
"At the top of the page, Picasso begins by sketching a bull. Even though he wants to end with as few lines as possible, his 2nd and 3rd drawings are more detailed than his first one. The horns are sharper and the tail is defined with sharp contrast. Only around the 4th or 5th drawing, when Picasso breaks the body into parts, does the image become simpler than Picasso’s initial drawing.
Crucially, Picasso couldn’t have started with the simple image that he ends with. Thinking so is the same fallacy that drives people to say “I could paint that” whenever they visit a modern art museum. Even if it’s true, it misses the point. Had Picasso started with only a small number of lines, just like the image he ends up with, his final rendition wouldn’t have been as pure. It wouldn’t have had the right rhythm or proportions between lines. Only by going through the process of compression can he find the ultimate distillation of a bull. "
🗂
The above excerpt is a part of a larger essay describing David Perell’s theory for creativity.
Expression is Compression.
My Favorite Bean Ever
If you’re not aware of speciality coffee, it is essentially craft/artisan coffee like we’ve craft beer. I discovered it almost 5 years ago, and to this day, the nuances of various taste notes that can be infused into a bean, like fine wine, has sent me in all directions, always looking for something new and indulging. But while trying, perhaps 100+ Varieties, the beans called Merthi Mountain by Curious Life Coffee Roasters has always been found on my shelves.
Across the coffee community in India, Curious Life is widely regarded as the best and most consistent roasters in the country.
That’s it for today. Hope you’re having a good end to a year as everybody is syncing together into a holiday mood at a relatively brighter time.
Talk soon,
Abhishek.
- Check out the Free Email Course: "How to Productively Consume Information Online"
- Manifesto for my software product: "Project MEMEX Manifesto"
- My Website.