Surf the commercial surfaces of any city, the pages of any magazine, the web, Facebook, or Twitter: it’s noisy out there. Graphic racket is the cultural norm — an overload of images in a relentless crusade for your clicks and credit card numbers. It’s enough to make your eyeballs hurt.

The death of Steve Jobs last year reminded us that as much as their stunning tech capabilities, what has made Apple and its products so desirable for more than 25 years has been the elegance and understated simplicity of their designs. In this era of visual overload, Apple’s team recognized the need for plain, clean designs.

Such thinking has been a part of progressive design since the industrial revolution. Timeless icons of design — the VW Beetle, an Eames chair, a building by Richard Neutra — reduce goods and ideas to their purest form. Decades later, they still stand, transcending trends and transforming visual noise into pure, clean tones.

What does all this have to do with cause-based branding? Everything. Cause-based communication is about connecting to the heart, not the head, which means your message has to cut through the visual noise — the competition from other nonprofits as well as constituents’ skepticism and the general public’s fears — and be heard in those clean, pure tones. It has to emerge from the smoke and fog like an island in a turbulent sea.

A few years ago, the Cedars-Sinai Board of Governors hired us to develop and brand a multimillion-dollar heart stem cell research campaign. In the end, we created a tiny red portfolio, roughly the size of a human heart, containing a few strong photographs and barely a hundred words of copy. It worked — beautifully — because its archetype was rooted in the spirit of compassionate generosity and the story it told connected literally and figuratively to the human heart. Simplicity was its key to success.

That’s the thing: while people’s eyes and brains may be bamboozled by the visual noise rattling the culture right now, their hearts still know instinctively how to connect with the truth of a brand — your brand — though the simplicity of its design.