This story is adapted from Chapter 3 of The Articulate Marketing Designer.

It’s very tempting to watch Jony Ive design videos produced by the matchless Apple marketing machine and then mistake them for educational lectures. They are, however, made to sell [damned good] products, not to teach design. While these videos are marketing, I don’t doubt that Ive is sincere about Apple’s noble drive to simplify where appropriate. But a five minute video can never capture the intricacy, nuance, and complexity that people as skilled and experienced as Ive and Apple’s design teams not only wrangle with, but even employ in their work. Sadly, some designers do see these videos as educational lectures. With pseudo-lectures in one hand and Apple’s clear success in the other, they charge towards simplicity with an unfortunate “simple design good, complex design bad” mentality.

…we find ourselves in a world where a perfectly valid design tool, simplicity, ends up feeling tired, overstretched, and misapplied by pretender hordes.

For the time being, the proverbial pendulum continues to swing towards simplicity. There’s a positive correlation between Apple’s market cap and how idiotically simplicity is applied by Apple wannabes. As a result, we find ourselves in a world where a perfectly valid design tool, simplicity, ends up feeling tired, overstretched, and misapplied by pretender hordes. All while another perfectly valid design tool, complexity, is left misunderstood, overlooked, and underused.

That said, the nice part about the proliferation of the cult of simplicity is that if you want to approach design with a measure of intelligence and nuance, you can quickly begin to distinguish yourself from the throngs of simple-seekers that fill the design world. To start, all you have to do is just add one layer of depth to how you think about complexity in design.

Complexity in design isn’t just about having lots of stuff going on. Though that’s undoubtedly an aspect of it. We can break complexity in visual design down into two components, proposed by researchers Rik Pieters, Michel Wedel, and Rajeev Batra: a mathematical, measurable complexity that’s easy to detect, and a more subtle aesthetic form of complexity, that’s not always readily measurable, but nonetheless challenges and interests our eyeballs, or the soft, pink, and gelatinous mass behind our eyeballs.

Measurable complexity, as its name suggests, can be detected as a quantity. And it can be detected with ease. In fact, your computer does it for you. That’s because this is complexity that reveals itself in the form of variation from pixel to pixel in your image. If you have one hundred pixels, the more different each of these pixels are from one another, the more measurably complex the image. Think of bold and highly variable patterns and textures. They introduce heavy visual clutter into an image. All else being equal, if you look at the file size of these images, you’ll see that they are noticeably larger than their cleaner counterparts. They make your eyes bleed and take up extra space on you hard drive while doing it. Measurable complexity, at least among western audiences, in marketing contexts seems to be perceived negatively. The evidence as to how more complex images are perceived in regions with more intricate and ornate art is more ambiguous. Therefore it’s wise to try to balance this very carefully.

As a rule of thumb, for images of the same size, format, and output settings, the lower the file size, the lower the measurable complexity.

You can compare images of the same size for their measurable complexity by outputting them in the same format and then checking their file sizes. As a rule of thumb, for images of the same size, format, and output settings, the lower the file size, the lower the measurable complexity. Usually, though, you can just use your eyes. If they’re bleeding, the image is likely very complex. But sometimes after working on something for hours it can be difficult to be objective, or your eyes may be drained of blood and can’t bleed anymore, so you can use this technique as an objective guide.

It’s aesthetic complexity where things get interesting. This is complexity that companies like Apple use deftly and quietly, and research shows that this form of complexity is effective at increasing the appeal of designs. The best way to experience this form of complexity is to take a walk through nature. Look at any forest or any gorgeous mountain range and you’ll see aesthetic complexity in action. Things in nature don’t tend to be perfectly symmetric. They don’t usually appear in a vacuum, but in clusters of randomly distributed objects. They aren’t perfectly spaced apart from one another. Shapes are imperfect, difficult to categorize. And things aren’t uniform, but usually dissimilar from one another. And within each object in nature, there is a microcosm of complexity, of pattern and texture. This is the rich and wondrous complexity you miss out on when you fall for the “simplicity good, complexity bad” dogma.

Aesthetic complexity is about intentionally building the visual world’s equivalent of musical dissonance into your designs

Lining things up perfectly along grids with precision won’t get you to this aesthetic complexity. Minimalism to the point that you have just one thing on the page won’t get you there either. If you want to tap into this subset of complexity then you’re going to have to get comfortable again with the ancient art of eyeballing things, keeping in mind that this is not an excuse to be sloppy.

Aesthetic complexity is about intentionally building the visual world’s equivalent of musical dissonance into your designs. It’s about not centering objects just so. It’s not about distributing objects with exactly 18 pixels betwen them. It’s about being, the opposite of clean and clinical. It’s about being a little wild. Take product shots from strange and novel angles, instead of straight on orthographic views. Throw several elements on the page and distribute them unevenly but with care and intent. Give individual objects textures or some pattern of interest, something more than just dull flatness. You don’t have to be skeumorphic, you just have to introduce some complexity.

There is an old saying about beauty and strangeness, and that is clearly the case here. Clinical, clean, simple design may occasionally pass as functional, but rarely is it as effective as it could be, because it doesn’t appeal to the human sense of beauty.

And what about Apple? Well, their design teams understand and appreciate the value of complexity, especially aesthetic complexity. You can see it in their products, from the original Macintosh with its floppy drive off to the side, to the MacBook Pro with its subtly glittering anodized coating. You can see it in their product photography that shows off the products in clever and delightful angles. You can even see it in their Jony Ive videos…he always sits off to the side of the camera rather than dead center and facing the camera head on, which would be the most simple arrangement.

Skeumorphism may be knocked out for the time being, but there’s no reason to shy away from introducing some non-skeumorphic and creative complexity. Simplicity is not good design. Neither is complexity. Good design is good design. So instead of falling for the marketing and chasing after simplicity like the pretenders…go ahead and live a little: inject some complexity in your work.

If you enjoyed this story, check out The Articulate Marketing Designer.