Research_On going
August 2022
The volume of information has grown exponentially. Without even realizing it, we pour incredible amounts of data onto the Web every day. By “incredible,” we mean about 2.5 quintillion bytes, or a 1 with 18 zeros after it. If you have difficulty understanding the amount of data, you are certainly not alone. Let’s translate this impossible-to-imagine number into something everyone can understand. There are so many HD movies on the web today that it would take 47 million years to see them all. There are over 1.8 billion websites, and on average 571 new ones are created every minute. In the early 2000s, there were 740 million cell phone subscriptions in the world. Two decades later, that number has surpassed 8 billion, which means there are now more cell phones in the world than people. That’s how much data we generated. No wonder information overload has become a problem. The large volume of information is not in itself a problem. The real problems are the lack of control over the quality of information, on the one hand, and our inability to control the flow of incoming information, on the other.
“Simplicity is hard to build, easy to use, and hard to charge for. Complexity is easy to build, hard to use and easy to charge for,” says Chris Sacca, an investor in Twitter, Kickstarter, Uber and other highly successful technology companies, who knows what works when it comes to technology. That led him to this counterintuitive truth: complexity is easy and true simplicity is hard. But the user experience is what makes investing in simplicity worthwhile. The same is true for communication. To make it easier for your audience to understand your message, you need to spend time thinking from their point of view so that you know how they will best process the information.
By focusing on the most essential data to be conveyed, it frees up space to be able to better tell the human side of the story.
Presenting complex information is the most challenging type of communication. In a world where information is growing with unprecedented speed, skills become more nuanced. We end up knowing our fields inside out, but communicating our expertise to a general audience becomes increasingly difficult. The ability to simplify, without belittling, distinguishes the communicator as a person to be heard. Honing this skill takes time, but it is worth investing it.
LDF Studio believes that these present times urge us to eliminate the superfluous to make room for the essential, for a qualitative simplicity that even in the field of design and fashion seemed to have been forgotten and is making a comeback after years characterized mainly by the search for excess and the continuous experimentation with new styles and concepts.
Simplicity means going back to the essence of an experience or brand, to speak directly and sincerely with customers and solve their real problems, and to do so in an evaluative way, without irrelevant frills. This is critical in the creative industry because it is what attracts, retains customers and, most importantly, makes customers feel that a brand understands them in a way that no one else does. Simplicity is creative by definition. It frees us from unnecessary artifice, the so-called “superstructures,” and leads us, in a balanced way, to the essence of what we really want to communicate.