In creative work, the instinct is often to add. Another layer, another message — more attempts to make sure nothing important has been missed. It's a reasonable response to a complex brief. But the most effective work tends to find its strength through concentration rather than accumulation — one idea, followed through completely, rather than several ideas held together loosely.

The assumption underneath it is that more communication produces more understanding. It rarely does. Attention is finite, and the more a piece of work asks of it, the less any single part tends to register. The things that stay with people — the images, the moments, the experiences they actually remember — are almost always simpler than the people who made them expected.

A campaign pitch for Fear Factor, the television format built entirely on physical discomfort and visceral reaction. The brief was to communicate the format — what it was, what made it distinctive. Campaigns like this often accumulate — more graphics, more messaging, more attempts to convey the scale and intensity of the thing. A designer did the opposite.

A laptop opened. The screen turned around. A tarantula, moving slowly across a black background. No words. No supporting graphics. Just the spider, and the feeling that arrived immediately and unbidden — the slight tension across the shoulders, the instinct to pull back, the awareness of your own reaction before you'd had time to think about it.

Nobody said anything for a moment.

It was enough — not because it explained the show, but because it produced the same reaction the show was built on. You didn't need to be told what Fear Factor felt like. You felt it. Everything else would have been in the way.

The instinct to add is partly about confidence — the less certain you are that something is working, the more you reach for another layer to support it. Knowing when to stop requires a different kind of conviction: that the thing at the centre is strong enough to stand on its own. Finding that thing — the image, the idea, the detail that carries the whole weight of what you're trying to say — is most of the work. Everything else should be tested against it. If it adds to that centre, it earns its place. If it doesn't, it's in the way.