KISS first, make out later

The "keep it simple, stupid" principle is a design rule that states that systems perform best when they have simple designs rather than complex ones.

KISS is not meant to imply stupidity. The design is kept so simple that it may be misconstrued as stupid, in the first look.

A bit of history, the phrase was coined in the US Navy by aircraft engineer Kelly Johnson in the sixties. Variations of the phrase include "keep it super simple", "keep it simple or be stupid", "keep it simple and straightforward", "keep it simple, silly" and few others.

Its a long haul journey, all the way from the navy till evangelizing the design approach in software industry - the KISS principle has indeed travelled quite some places, in preaching the importance of minimalism.

Diving into the startup scene and figuring out the processes: from validating the idea, bootstrapping, funding, execution, competition, scaling, success with exit - there is a dire need to strip away a lot of the complexity and make it as simple as it can get. 

Be it the elevator pitch or trying to build customers and sustain user engagement with your product, one should learn the art of tweeting. 

You heard me right - ability to narrow down to a few words and thus conveying all that is needed to know.

Never to forget that "Less is more" is the future (has always been).

The best followed strategy in Internet product development is mobile first. Rather than complicating by building your design for the desktop PCs, try building it on smaller phone screens and then convert that for viewing on larger screen. In this way you don't have to take the trouble to adjust a larger content for mobile viewing.

A friend once told me about a strategy that Steve Jobs had employed when he got back to head Apple a second time. He drew a quadrant and placed 4 products in it. Only to focus on these 4 products - the iBook, iMac, PowerMacintosh, PowerBook and dumped most part of remaining running projects at Apple.

By kissing other projects goodbye he made it simpler for his teams to focus on the smaller lot. Then he got to perfect his designs for each of the products. 

The rest as we know is history.

When I wanted to design my portfolio website, I took inspiration from his four quadrant product grid. I kissed goodbye to 1 row, many column multipage website, for a simpler one page design with no rows or columns and no scrolling (regular/parallax) either. 

Could I do away with the content too, to give it the absolute minimalistic feel? Sure.

Build your design keeping in mind the content for small screen (smart phone) viewing and then make it out large for the larger versions (phablet, tablet and desktop).