Minimalism

I like it, especially what Microsoft has done with it.

 

Do you think Google had to do with this? They started using minimalism on all of their sites starting with their search. When they released gmail I know I based many of my designs on gmail.

I'm not a graphics designer, that's why I love creating plain simple web sites.

 

I love the minimalist design. I want the web page to be simple and easy to navigate. I don't want wild colors and distractions all over the place. Less really is more in my opinion. You don't want to confuse the user and make him hit control f to find what he wants. It should be right there, centralized and easily visible without much clutter to sort through.

 

Leonardo Davinci

Steve Jobs

Walt Witmann

Frank Loyd Wright

I'd say, these guys can't be wrong.

Scott

 

Uh... "Web 2.0" is a pretty meaningless phrase in this context. It's been around since 1999 and simply means non-static content. Now, as far as lightweight and minimalist fast loading designs, this is nothing new to anyone who 's been designing since the early web days. We dealt with dialup and a paid a lot of attention to payload size. What's really happened is we've come full circle now that bandwidth is yet again an issue with so many mobile users. Now the funny thing is in another 5 years or so as more 4G and higher bandwidth becomes available in more and more areas... we're likely to see site designs go "heavy" again.

Personally, I've always tried to go for a smaller/faster overall payload size for several reasons: 1) even these days due to my audience I still have about 5% "extreme rural" users stuck with dialup, 2) I pay less for 2 co-located servers than most people pay for a singled leased dedicated server but I'm paying 95% percentile for bandwidth so I try to keep bandwidth low, 3) its good for keeping bounce rates low, 4) what others said about less is more, I tend to find users visit more pages per session when the design isn't crowded.

 

Before minimalism became trendy, I was already trying to design this way by the time when tables were common to layout designing.

Obviously, today I found this trend very useful, as it was useful when I tried to do it myself first.

In example, while a graphics logo can be outstanding, I find more useful use web fonts and CSS text effect for this purpose because, after all, search engines can't read graphics and therefore it's necessary optimize the image for SEO purpose in mind, plus the extra effort to set it up into the layout, something that is not necessary using only textual resources.

And I could keep pointing at some of those advantages that I see in minimalist designs