Thanks for kicking off the discussion! You’ve got me thinking about those “artistic parts” and wondering if the rule applies to them as well – I recall many long meetings debating to the nth degree copy for an ad, when it was clear that for most of the audience that effort was clearly in the realm of diminishing returns. Same goes in architecture, hours and hours fussing over details that only another architect would notice. To counter this, there are clearly examples, like the iPhone, where compromise over design would not have yielded such a great result. Where I’m heading is: do we want a good enough rule for the feature set, but perfection for the execution of the design? That is, work out what people really need (no unnecessary features) and then execute that minimum feature set brilliantly?

Cheers,
Rich