I spent two weeks last December inside a small scheduling studio in Turin, watching the team remove features they had defended all year. The calendar kept its grid, but the colored badges, urgent labels, and welcome tours disappeared. What remained was not emptiness; it was relief, a surface that let the work cast its own shadow.
Absence is a material decision
The mistake is to treat restraint as a mood board. It is closer to procurement: which weights of type, which edge, which grey, which silence. By the final Friday, the screen had fewer instructions and more authority, because every remaining line had to prove why it was there.