

Minimalism Isn’t the Alpha and Omega of Design - joshuacc
http://designpepper.com/blog/post/minimalism-isnt-the-alpha-and-omega-of-design/

======
mbateman
There's a reason why modernism is modern and the rest are mostly historical. A
lot of historical approaches to aesthetics are overly flowery and complex by
today's standards. This is because in the historical context the fact that any
of this was possible was remarkable and something to be emphasized. Today most
people don't think it's that remarkable that you can cram a bunch of flowery
crap into something, or make it super-intricate and fragile and still
transport it. Those are solved problems.

With that said, however, I love Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and a bunch of less
minimalist (compared to Bauhaus) modern styles. But they are minimalist
compared to those historical styles. In some ways they are partly a
streamlining of the more interesting parts of some of more historical styles.
They aren't "minimalist" in the technical sense of that term, but I'm not sure
that e.g. Apple's products are minimalist in that sense either.

It's hard for me to come up with examples of things that are really totally
non-minimalist, like Baroque, that I'd like to see in e.g. software or
computer hardware... Maybe some of the spinoffs of Russian constructivism.
Some of them aren't really minimalist at all, and many are awesome.

EDIT: Here are some examples of non-Bauhaus-style web design that are still
modern. Might be better than looking at historical architecture.

<http://www.pho-ku.com/> \-- The Designers Republic (Russian constructivism
inspired)

<http://joshuaink2006.johnoxton.co.uk/> \-- web designer's blog I've always
found pretty :)

<http://www.happycog.com/create/> \-- there's a good variety here, most of
which could be construed as minimalist, but none of which seems Bauhaus-y.

~~~
ugh
I think people tend to conflate functional (how it works) minimalism with
aesthetic (how it looks) minimalism. (I just made those terms up but they seem
to work nicely.)

Functionality and aesthetics are connected but I would argue that functional
minimalism doesn’t have to lead to aesthetic minimalism.

Aesthetic minimalism is a specific look: a specific color palette, a specific
set of fonts, a specific use of illustrations and photos, a specific use of
geometries and space.

Some of those specific properties of aesthetic minimalism may indeed lead to
better functionality like less distraction and better readability. Much of the
rest of it is mostly fashion. There is a wider range of aesthetics with which
your design can work and be functional — I would very much despise living in a
world were all everyone ever wants to achieve is a minimalist look.

I would also argue that functional minimalism is always a laudable design
goal, independent of your aesthetics. At least when your goal is designing
something that people are supposed to use and not, say, art. (I should again
emphasize that both are obviously connected. You can’t make your aesthetic
choices independent of your functional choices, it’s just that there is a
wider range of options than just aesthetic minimalism.)

------
powrtoch
I'm a developer who sometimes gets stuck with design work for websites. Having
no design training whatsoever, I find that minimalism is the form in which I
will embarrass myself the least, and the one which requires the least amount
of photoshop/illustrator know-how to get running. For me, it is the path of
least resistance that still gets the job done.

I agree with the author entirely, minimalism is big right now, but it's silly
to take that as a sign that it is the One Divinely Ordained Design Choice. But
I wonder how much of minimalism on the web is a result of situations like
mine.

~~~
antonioono
"I think [Steve Jobs'] choice of a minimalist aesthetic comes from his fear of
making the wrong aesthetic choice."

If Alan Deutschman is correct, you are in good company.

That said, I think many people forget that, while it's harder to screw up a
"minimalist" design, it's also harder to create truly outstanding minimal
design. The recent minimalism trend only perpetuates the conflation of
simplicity and easiness.

People also seem to conflate functional and aesthetic minimalism a lot.

------
tel
I disagree with the statement that minimalism is just one style. There's
something more fundamental to it than what can be encompassed by sweeping it
under the carpet of "style".

Minimalism along with its cousins of Utilitarianism and Tufte-like information
design all seek an elegance through elimination of components that are not
vital to some singular goal of the philosophy.

    
    
       Utilitarianism: capacity generation/utility
       Tufte: information and interpretation
       Minimalism: content and structure
    

The importance here is that given that our brains have limited capacity for
attention, these philosophies help us the most so long as our goals reside
near the goal of the designer. With a lot of other "styles" displayed in the
article the goals were less practical and further from the end user with
intent to express the glory of god or the power of a monarch. They are
fantastically beautiful, but in those cases beauty is orthogonal to their
function (meeting places and homes).

So that's the twist. You can make ornate, anti-minimal designs so long as
their beauty lies at least somewhat alongside the purpose of the website. It's
long been the maxim of web design that Users Spend Epsilon Seconds at Your
Site and unless the purpose and content is clear like gunfire you're out of
luck. But then you've got "functional beauty" such as that contained within
detailed arts like typography. Each has a distinct utilitarian flair, but
espouses a lot of craft via excessive care for detail.

So, some examples:

    
    
       http://wufoo.com/
       http://jasonsantamaria.com/articles/royal/
       http://blog.iso50.com/
       http://joshuaink2006.johnoxton.co.uk/
       (mbateman already mentioned Joshua Ink, but it's just a really good example)
       

And really, though it's not the same medium, the maximalist style of David
Foster Wallace is from the exact same creche.

Of course, the catch is that with every added element, you take the risk of
having your design run away from you. It's a viciously hard thing to do, I
think, keeping beauty and purpose aligned.

------
sumeetjain
I can appreciate the value of various styles, and I think the world would be
worse off if all artists decided to reduce their work to some definition of
its "necessary" components. Art helps to evolve us. It's also probably
impossible to define the "necessary" components for most art.

However, I think there are shades of gray in the question of minimalist design
for websites. Web applications aren't like Melk Abbey, Queluz Palace, or the
Grand Palais. They aren't meant to be _beheld_. They're meant to be used at an
intricate level, and it can often be harder to do that when there are
ornamental or otherwise decorative components to the design. I still think the
author's thesis is true - that minimalism isn't the end-all of design. But I
do think that - on balance - minimalist designs are more effective than other
designs for web applications.

Other kinds of websites (Some websites _are_ meant to be beheld, after all)
can lose value with a minimalist approach - or not.

~~~
saint-loup
>>>Web applications aren't like Melk Abbey, Queluz Palace, or the Grand
Palais. They aren't meant to be beheld.

So is architecture, in a way. Living in a house is close to _using_ it. It's
almost interaction design. (Arguably, it's more true of houses than of
monuments.)

~~~
sumeetjain
It comes down to the level of intricacy in the usage. The extent to which I
use...

 _...the Sistine Chapel_ \- Stand in it.

 _...my house_ \- Live in it.

 _...a web app_ \- Click all sorts of buttons, encounter alerts, make micro-
decisions.

As the intricacy of usage increases, so too does the risk of negative
distraction (as opposed to positive distraction, like being awestruck by the
Sistine Chapel's ceiling and not hearing a friend call my name).

~~~
tjpick
My house: cook in it, sleep in it, exercise in it, practice music in it, work
in it, build furniture in it, wash my clothes in it, entertain guests, dine in
it and so on and so forth.

Most web apps: browse it.

Can't remember what my point is, but that you're oversimplifying on the first
two examples and expanding the web app example.

------
Nagyman
In my experience, "web designers" arguing in favour of simplicity is for
greater usability, not necessarily better design.

On a related note, the giant fixed background image on that website makes
scrolling choppy and unusable, so I can understand the argument for simplicity
in web design.

~~~
joshuacc
What web browser & OS are you using? I'll be happy to check out the scrolling
issues.

~~~
Nagyman
Chrome and Firefox on OSX both experience the issue. Safari is smooth. The
problem disappears without the background-position set to fixed. The
transparent effect would be lost, but it actually still looks good when the
background just scrolls by default.

~~~
joshuacc
Thanks for the details. Chrome and Firefox on my Windows machine are quite
smooth, but I didn't test them on a Mac.

I'll look into this further.

~~~
eagleal
I'm on Firefox 3.6.8/Win, and I have the same problem. It's more a problem
with the browser itself (FF4 with retained layers should have no problems I
guess).

This also happens when you abuse with shadows (text or boxes/divs).

edit: @joshuacc, since I can't reply directly to your comment: It probably
depends on the machine resources. I'm on a 5y old notebook.

~~~
joshuacc
Thanks for letting me know that it happens on your machine as well.

I've switched the background image to scroll until I can do proper testing,
though I haven't been able to reproduce it yet.

------
cageface
Apple has been so successful with its minimalist approach that everybody else
is falling over themselves to imitate it. It's getting a little tiresome
seeing one computer after another that looks like a German kitchen appliance.
Hopefully in this decade people will have the courage to branch out a little
more and explore other aesthetics.

~~~
zephyrfalcon
Apple does seem to be a big trendsetter in this regard, so I hope that at some
point they will come up with designs that are a little more imaginative. You
know, the way they did around 1998-2001, with the colorful and curvy iMacs and
iBooks, that stood out from the square/beige box crowd. (Same CEO and same
designer that are responsible for today's colorless rectangular products, by
the way.)

~~~
ramchip
I actually preferred the square, beige boxes, compared to a lot of the boxes
they sell nowadays. It was very sturdy, harder to scratch, didn't look dusty
after a couple days, and because of the shape easy to clean, store or
transport. Downside: sharp metal ends.

Take the interior of a modern case, with the airy wires, no screws drive bays,
air filter, put it in a square beige metal box and you'd get a great
utilitarian box for office or general geek use.

------
ccc3
The author's examples are not relevant to the argument. If you're just trying
to design something that is, on its face, beautiful, there are obviously many
viable styles besides modernism. The goal of web design is different from the
goal of palace design or ornate ceiling design. Web design must be usable or
it has failed. I think a better analogy in the physical world would be the
design of tools. If you were driving nails all day, would you rather use a
modernist hammer or a hammer that looks like that Rococo table?

I take his point that modernism has become close to dogma for some web
designers, but I don't see how an abbey built in the early 1700s relates to a
website.

------
billswift
Simplicity, or what I prefer to call "cleanness", is an enduring type of
design - it is not a single style like "modernist", unless you consider
Shakers and many even older vernacular styles modern. In web sites designed to
inform rather than entertain, simplicity is a must, and even then they are
still not very good at informing. Anything that gets in the way of that is
bad. Buildings are functional, but the problem with the post's comparison is
that all the gingerbread and painting on a building is orthogonal to the
function of a building, where on a web site any added ornamentation directly
affects its usability.

------
mechanical_fish
Many good points in this thread.

I would add that modern computer tech is very, very unstable. The designers of
Baroque art and architecture were building upon hundreds of years of
tradition. Web design is not yet a twenty-year-old field.

The problem with new fields is that you need to optimize for rapid change. The
parts of your design need to be interchangeable. And the audience sees such a
variety of experimental designs - the standards are in such a state of infancy
- that it's important to design things that are easily discoverable and
quickly grasped. Both of these factors tend to favor minimalism.

~~~
joshuacc
This is a good point that's worth exploring more. Not sure if I'll get around
to it myself, but I'd love to see a post on this subject.

------
siglesias
Sometimes I feel that "minimalism" is used as a crutch for designers who are
unable to commit to bold aesthetic choices. The downside, of course, is that
it's nearly impossible to distinguish oneself and to develop an idiosyncratic
style when everything but function is stripped away. And sometimes the
function is to dazzle with more than five colors, to show that the designer
was able to harmonize multiple elements, where then we're beyond design as
mere function, thus undermining the minimalist program a little bit.

------
Aegean
The term 'design' is taken differently here, with more emphasis on art than
engineering.

If you're engineering a piece of work, your design will surely be better if it
is minimalistic. But if what you mean by 'design' is an artistic approach,
certainly minimalism is not a goal.

~~~
joshuacc
"If you're engineering a piece of work, your design will surely be better if
it is minimalistic."

That all depends on what you mean by "engineering." :-)

------
aero142
I think the goal of design is to make the aesthetics match the functionality.
In software, the greatest challenge is making something that at it's core is
very complex, with all of the code that it takes to make it happen, and make
it simple for the user. The minimalist design represents this goal visually in
the product.

But there are many other things where the experience or an emotional reaction
is the goal, not usability. For example, in music, if the focus of a song is a
really great melody, then you want to simplify the surrounding parts so the
listener isn't distracted from the melody. This is similar to the modern
design we are discussing. In metal music, the goal is energy, so each part is
very rapid and complex to give more energy to the song. The drums keep
driving, the guitar keeps moving, etc. This is not minimalist because the goal
is different. Imagine a theme park. The goal is fun and immersion. So, the
pathways in a theme park are not minimalist, they are winding and meandering
and take you through the park where the journey is the goal. All of these
things exist to match the goal of the product.

------
wdewind
The wallpaper on that article is so useless and distracting I actually closed
the window before I read 1 word.

Minimalism may not be the alpha and omega, but it's definitely something.

Edit: In all seriousness, minimalism is about defining the problem clearly,
finding the least number of things needed to solve the problem, and discarding
things that don't. Just like in computer science, it's about finding the most
generic answer possible. Steve Jobs isn't afraid of making the "wrong" choice,
he's afraid of making a choice that's too specific.

Properly generic design has GREAT mass appeal, whereas while super graphic
focused design may have much more appeal to a subgroup. Sometimes super
graphic focused design IS in fact minimalism: when you need to target a
subgroup of culture specifically and with a high impact, an Apple-generic
product simply will not work. In that case using embelishments solves a very
clear problem: appeal. Apple simply appeals to the biggest audience they can.

------
sdfx
He points out that minimalism isn't the "best" design, just a different style
and a designer has to pick the most appropriate one. While I wouldn't call
this an earth shattering new insight, it's still is a fair point.

But his examples are poorly chosen to underline his position. You can't point
to designs that have come and gone and disprove that simplicity is an
attribute of good design. He should have pointed to other contemporary styles
that are clearly not as simplistic as possible but still "good" (for example
the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao [1] or the Beijing National Stadium [2]).

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guggenheim_Museum_Bilbao> [2]
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_National_Stadium>

~~~
joshuacc
Thanks for the examples. I agree that mine could have been better chosen. I
might add some of the ones from this thread to the original post.

------
jamesbritt
'But in point of fact, this notion of reducing a subject to its “necessary”
elements isn’t a universal principle of design. It’s a principle of modernist
design.'

Depends on what is meant by "necessary". Baroque art achieves a particular
effect by virtue of its ornamentation.

Still, offering a definition of good design that happens to describe
minimalism obviously isn't helpful. It's the sort of question begging that
just leads to needless arguments.

It's more useful to try to understand how you can have a minimalism site on
one hand, and an ornate, busy site on the other, and they can still both look
good.

~~~
eagleal
> [...] Depends on what is meant by "necessary". Baroque art achieves a
> particular effect by virtue of its ornamentation. [...]

Except the fact that you're presenting information (being it a webapp, or just
a restaurant site).

~~~
jamesbritt
You are also presenting ambience and attitude, which effect the user's
perception of your site and business.

------
ollysb
In a noisy, communication oriented environment is it any wonder that design
has tended towards simplicity. The examples of historical design given all
communicate a superior status for the family/institution that had requested
it's construction. Granted, similar vanity projects of today also tend towards
minimalist design principles. Perhaps this is a reflection of the increased
importance that society now places on communication.

------
metamemetics
Why minimalism is good for the web:

Making something overly artistic with excessive eye candy might be timeless
for a historical chapel or castle, but looks horribly outdated in 5 years on
the web.

Remember all of those painfully cheesy flash intros for restaurant websites? I
bet they thought they looked so futuristic and the coolest ever at the time.

------
stevedekorte
The author suggests minimalism is trending upward, but I haven't seen this.
What gets called "minimalist" is often still full of ornament and unnecessary
complexity.

e.g look at all the weird curves on Dell's current desktops - those curves are
all ornamental.

------
joubert
The documentary, Helvetica, is worth watching to see various typeface
designers' love/hate for the severity of the minimalism implicated by Bauhaus.

------
rodion_89
Holy crap, did he really use Flash like THAT for his nav buttons?!

~~~
sp332
He's using sIFR for "non-standard" web fonts.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIFR>

If you look at the code in the article, you can see that the HTML is pretty
clean, and the Flash is injected by js at runtime. This means searchability
isn't compromised, and the page degrades gracefully for non-Flash-enabled
browsers. But it does kinda break copy-and-paste.

