The Kindle 2 is beautiful and awesome. The screen is crisp and doesn’t hurt my eyes one bit. I was so excited the first day that I bought a 300 page book, and read 41% of it in the first day. I haven’t read a book like that in years. I’ve since been reading like a madman and I honestly can’t understand why. At this rate I’ll earn back the money I spent on the Kindle by saving so much on the books! Each book is typically only $10 as compared to the upwards of $30 I was paying for the printed versions.

My only complaint about the Kindle is I freaking wish it could just read a PDF. I can convert PDFs to a Kindle readable format but they come out so badly. Most end up being just one gigantic paragraph of text. Aside from the PDF issue, I would recommend the Kindle to all my friends (and have been). I need some Kindle buddies yo!

Maeda’s book breaks down the idea of designing with simplicity in mind into 10 easy to remember laws, written within 100 pages exactly and reinforced with easy to remember acronyms, making even the act of reading and learning from the book an act of simplicity.

One of the ideas that really stuck with me was the law of reduction. One of the key objectives of reduction, Maeda explains, is the idea of shrinking.

When a small, unassuming object exceeds our expectations, we are not only surprised but pleased. Our usual reaction is something like, “That little thing did all that?” Simplicity is about the unexpected pleasure derived from what is likely to be insignificant and would otherwise go unnoticed. The smaller the object, the more forgiving we can be when it misbehaves.

A company that successfully employs this reduction principle is Google. When you visit their home page you are greeted with a search box and two buttons. Compare this to the other less popular search engines and you will notice a striking difference. Other search engines seem bloated and full of unnecessary elements. Google thrives off the fact that people visit search engines in order to search, not to be swamped with content and links that have no relevance to them.

Still think simplicity is a commonly known idea?В  Learn more about simplicity by picking up a copy of Maeda’s book.