The Rise Of Min­i­mal­is­tic Web Design

Since the 1950s, min­i­mal­ism has been a pop­u­lar de­sign choice, mak­ing its way into vir­tu­ally every vi­sual medium in ex­is­tence, and even music.

The re­duc­tion of screen space in mo­bile de­vices is mak­ing min­i­mal­ism not sim­ply an aes­thetic choice, but a necessity.

This re­al­ity is forc­ing de­sign­ers to fa­mil­iar­ize them­selves with the ba­sic tenets of min­i­mal de­signs, and how to max­i­mize the vi­sual im­pact of them with such lim­ited real es­tate. Many pop­u­lar web sites have re­cently switched to sim­pli­fied, min­i­mal­is­tic designs.

How Min­i­mal­ism Can Help Web Design

A suc­cess­ful min­i­mal­is­tic de­sign is un­clut­tered, eye-catch­ing and sim­ple to process by the ob­server. Whether you’re in­ter­ested in pro­mot­ing vir­tual events or just dis­play­ing sta­tic in­for­ma­tion, a min­i­mal­ist de­sign is a good way of sim­pli­fy­ing information.

In the ma­jor­ity of in­stances, a ma­jor com­po­nent, like an em­bed­ded video, pic­tures or other forms, is sur­rounded by a small set of features.

Min­i­mal­ism is not solely about elim­i­nat­ing ex­tra­ne­ous el­e­ments; true min­i­mal­ism is highly ef­fec­tive be­cause the de­sign started with the least amount of el­e­ments in mind in the first place. With this, the de­signer takes into con­sid­er­a­tion the end user ex­pe­ri­ence and works to make not just an un­clut­tered in­ter­face with some miss­ing fea­tures, but one which is a plea­sure to use and has all the fea­tures a vis­i­tor expects.

Color

One of the hall­marks of min­i­mal­ism is a lim­ited palette. By lim­it­ing color choices, the de­signer can achieve a greater con­trast and em­pha­sis on im­por­tant parts of the interface.

This does not mean min­i­mal­is­tic de­signs are drab. Web pages for youth ob­vi­ously will ben­e­fit from a splash of a bright color or two.

A clas­si­cal, black and white de­sign can re­main mod­ern and crisp while adding a sin­gle ac­cent color to the header, menu items or other im­por­tant fea­tures on the page. Color alone can trans­form a and in­ject life into a design.

White­space

Neg­a­tive space, or white­space, is of­ten used cre­atively in min­i­mal­ism through tweaks in text and ob­ject align­ment, mar­gins, padding and more. Empty space can em­pha­size the other ar­eas by lead­ing the eye to them naturally.

As an ex­am­ple, the de­signer should look to grid-based de­signs, which marry un­com­pli­cated im­age and text blocks in even ra­tios to pro­duce a clean look which just work, even though they are very simple.

Type

Good fonts are very im­por­tant in min­i­mal­ism, as there is usu­ally very lit­tle text in type of design.

What­ever text is there, in the menus, sub­head­ings, lo­gos, etc., should be clean and bold, lest the stronger de­sign el­e­ments sim­ply over­power and the mes­sage is not de­liv­ered. Fonts should be co­he­sive with er­est of the de­sign, and noth­ing is worse than see­ing a font mis­matched with the rest of the graph­i­cal el­e­ments (think a kid­die font on a se­ri­ous busi­ness web­site, or an Old Eng­lish font on a bright gam­ing site. Ouch!)

Com­mon Mistakes

The irony of min­i­mal­ism is that while it is sim­ple to look at, it is dif­fi­cult to mas­ter. The dif­fer­ence be­tween cut­t­ing-edge, con­tem­po­rary work and some­thing dull or frus­trat­ing can come from just a few things. Here are a few things to watch out for:

• Poor Nav­i­ga­tion. Min­i­mal­ism should make web­sites things eas­ier to use. When in doubt, use very sim­ple and clean text menus or bread­crumbs. Noth­ing is more frus­trat­ing to visit a site and be con­fronted with a piece of mod­ern art with zero dis­cernible way to get around, ex­cept per­haps by click­ing odd ar­eas on the page and hope a menu pops up.

• Un­bal­anced El­e­ments. Mis­aligned el­e­ments, con­flict­ing color choices, text which is too small, lack of neg­a­tive space - these types of flaws can ruin an oth­er­wise promis­ing page, es­pe­cially when a page de­signed for a reg­u­lar browser is viewed on a mo­bile de­vice. As you can get spoiled when work­ing in a big­ger area, it might pay off to reg­u­larly load the page on a mo­bile de­vice as you work in or­der to see the ef­fects on your design.

• Poor Fo­cus. The point of min­i­mal­ism is to draw at­ten­tion to the con­tent through the use of bold, yet spare el­e­ments. Gen­er­ally, it is dif­fi­cult to try to use min­i­mal­ism to di­rect the at­ten­tion to many choices, as is pos­si­ble with tra­di­tional web de­sign full of menu items, text links, wid­gets, etc. De­sign­ers should work back­wards from the end point they wish the vis­i­tor to ar­rive to, and en­sure each prior step cor­rectly fo­cuses the at­ten­tion on how to get there.

Min­i­mal­ism done right is pleas­ing to the eye and can be much more en­gag­ing than a typ­i­cal web de­sign. It does re­quire a bit of study, as all of the ba­sics of art come into play with great im­por­tance: the color wheel, com­po­si­tion, space, shape, form, tex­ture and more.

The work spent on learn­ing these things will, how­ever, pay off with bet­ter look­ing de­signs in the much tighter mo­bile spaces.

Stephan Ju­kic is a free­lance writer who gen­er­ally cov­ers a va­ri­ety of sub­jects re­lat­ing to the lat­est changes in white hat SEO, mo­bile tech­nol­ogy, mar­ket­ing tech and dig­i­tal se­cu­rity. He also loves to read and write about lo­­ca­­tion-free busi­ness, portable busi­ness man­age­ment and fi­nance. When not busy writ­ing or con­sult­ing on tech­nol­ogy and dig­i­tal se­cu­rity, he spends his days en­joy­ing life’s ad­ven­tures ei­ther in Canada or Mex­ico, where he spends part of the year. Con­nect with Stephan on LinkedIn.