Mr Katzmarzyk was my art teacher in high school. A fresh-faced man in his 40’s, he was a pivotal influence on me learning some of the craft of art and design I still use today. He taught me 3-point perspective, pencil techniques like cross-hatching, colour theory, how to see tone and line. But the single most important lessons he taught me – back in 1984 – was to be patient with my work, to discard first ideas, and to look at my work with a view to removing, rather than to adding. Pretty heavy lessons for an 11 year old. But they stuck fast. He would have me redraw and redraw the same still life study, not with a view of perfecting, but to explore the subject and the way I was representing it. Every time, the drawing was more simple, elegant and efficient.

He also taught me about noise. Noise in my work, noise in my technique. He described efficiency of thought and process in a way my child-like brain could grasp. He taught me that by doing less, we can get to something in our work so much more appealing. And that underpinning concept is something that I realised only recently I refer to almost every day. It’s in my design DNA. I can still smell the power paint as he told me:

“Doing more is easier than doing less”.

And that’s it.

When someone hires me for my work, they’re not paying me for what I give them. They’re paying for what I don’t give them: the iteration, the obvious ideas, the sub-optimal solutions, the years of experience, the learning I do. They’re paying me to make mistakes, to produce work that isn’t quite right so I can get to right. I rarely get to right first time.

I may produce more quantity of work this way, but the end result is always less than when I started. More simple, elegant, efficient.

When designing a user interface ask yourself not ‘what does this need?’, but ‘what can this do without?’. As Brendan Dawes says: ‘Boil, Reduce, Simmer’. Remove, iterate, remove some more. Sleep on it. Come back in a day or so. Chances are, you’ll need to remove some more. Get back to the essence of the materials you’re working with.

So, for all of this, when someone asks me what they get. I tell them: they’ll get less, but they’ll get better. And for that, thank you Mr Katzmarzyk.