Wagner Design Associates Blog

June 10, 2010

Graphic design and advertising firm, Wagner Design Associates, has announced the addition of a new team member. Nancy Miller joins the firm as office manager.

Miller attended Sanford Brown Business College in St. Louis, MO before moving to Ann Arbor. Her work experience is varied, including marketing communications, human resources, business-to-business sales and customer service. She also has banking experience and served as treasurer on the board of a cooperative preschool.

As Wagner Design’s new office manager, Miller’s responsibilities will include client care, accounting, clerical duties and copywriting.

Wagner Design provides a full range of creative graphic design and advertising services to organizations in the high technology, retail, health care, financial, and academic sectors. The firm has won recognition and awards for its work in print collateral, direct mail, electronic communications, web design, and has been featured in various design publications.

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“Keep it Simple, Stupid.” This is how I heard it. I believe I was in about eighth grade and it was English class with Mr. Morwick, and I had a run-on sentence, much like this one, with way too many adjectives and repetition, just like this one. You get the point. The principle acknowledges that in good graphic design, it’s not the complexity of the design that makes it work, but what remains when the accessories are eliminated. I didn’t realize in eighth grade that this was a design principle, crossing many design fields. It can be compared to Occam’s razor, and Albert Eistein’s Maxim, “everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Even Colin Chapman, founder of Lotus, urged his designers to “Simplify, and add lightness.” Disney animators follow the principle as well. Here at our graphic design company in Ann Arbor, we follow this principle too.

There are variations on the phrase, which weren’t familiar to me, but maybe you heard it one of these ways: Keep it simple and stupid. Keep it small and simple. Keep it sweet and simple. Keep it speckless and sane. Keep it sober and significant. But my favorite is, keep it super simple. But, if we really wanted to take out the complexity, shouldn’t we just call it Kis?