According to a prominent Soviet science fiction writer, beauty is a fine line, a razor’s edge between two opposites locked in a never-ending battle. Today, we would put it less poetically as an ideal compromise between contradictions. An elegant, or beautiful, design is one that allows reaching that compromise.
As an information security professional, I like elegant designs — all the more so because trade-off is a prerequisite for an information security manager’s success: in particular, trade-off between the level of security and its cost in the most practical, literal sense.