The Art of Subtraction: Why the Best Work Is Made by Taking Away

Reading time 2 minutes

We love adding. One more feature, one more agenda item, one more slide. Adding looks like work and feels like progress. But past a certain point, every addition takes away from what actually matters. The strongest things — in design, in a brand, on a stage, even in an ordinary conversation — are rarely made by adding. They are made by subtracting.

Designers have known this for a long time. A painting needs a white wall around it to stand out. Hang ten more beside it and the eye no longer knows where to look; even the strongest piece disappears. The same holds for an event, a product, a presentation: the space around a message is not empty. It is its amplifier.

So why do we keep adding? Because taking away is harder and riskier. No one gets fired for adding. We add a workshop because someone asked for it. We add a feature because a competitor has it. We add a slide because “better to have it there.” And suddenly a great thing carries so many layers that its own point gets lost.

“It’s an illusion that adding things increases quality or the experience. Up to a point it does — and then, with each further addition, quality drops sharply,” says strategist and designer Jakub Ptačin. This is not minimalism for effect. It is the discipline of deciding: knowing what the core is, and having the courage to let everything else go.

And this isn’t just an aesthetic feeling — it can be measured. In 2000, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper (“When Choice Is Demotivating”) set up two jam-tasting tables in a grocery store: one with 24 flavours, one with six. The larger selection drew more people — 60% of passers-by stopped, versus 40% at the smaller one. So far, as expected: more looks more appealing. But at the checkout it flipped. Of the shoppers who saw 24 jams, only 3% bought one; of those who saw six, nearly a third did. A tenfold difference — and the only change was that something had been taken away. The same study confirmed it beyond the store: students offered six essay topics instead of thirty were more likely to write one — and wrote better essays.

Why? Because attention and decision-making are exhaustible. Every additional option adds load, doubt, and the risk that a person simply won’t decide at all. So when we take something away, it is not a loss. It is a gift — freed-up space for the attention of the person we are doing it for. Fewer options, a clearer decision, greater satisfaction with it.

Try it on your next project. One exercise: cut one thing you insist on. Then cut one more. Watch what happens to what remains — it almost always gets stronger. I remind myself of this on every event and every presentation: fewer things, done fully, with room around them. It sounds simple. Like every principle that truly works.

Štefan Hric — Managing Partner, Creative Pro Group

“I believe events can change the world. For the better.”

This theme came up on our podcast Deje sa to! — the full conversation (in Slovak language) with Jakub Ptačin on events, design and the courage to subtract is on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.