> even the composition of these simplistic elements into a final design requires almost no talent or skill.
I don't want to watch your minimal designs if you think that way.
The principles required to make a beautiful composition with minimal elements are exactly the same as those to create beautiful composition in a baroque setting. Conversely, a minimal design may also look like shit if done carelessly.
Then don't. Not to be insulting but I believe you and many people who think Modern Design is hard are deluded. It's really similar to the douche baggery present in Modern Art.
Composition is easy as pie, humans are already masters of composition.
Let me give you an example.
Try to concoct in your imagination a very beautiful girl, don't do it from memory just picture for you what would be the most ideal woman in the world... easy right? That is composition. You composed body parts and facial features and composed something.
Now draw that beautiful girl naked with perfect anatomical correctness as if you were looking at her through a fish eye lens from an extreme angle... That is hard or near impossible from a person without years of practice. This is true art and talent that I respect....
What is a website but a composition of geometric shapes, premade pictures and text? My beautiful woman example is an exaggeration compared to web design, but it illustrates a principle that is true. A minimal design takes time and effort to construct but we have the instinctual knowledge of what looks good and what grabs attention and what improves UX. Thus almost anybody has what it takes to "Design" stuff. Especially if it's minimal.
Rendering a design is significantly easier than fine art. Artistically, the units of a web page already exist, cover pictures, stock photos, fonts, geometric tools in illustration programs all allow us to render a website design with little talent.
It will not take years for someone to learn photoshop and HTML and it certainly takes very little time to recognize the elements of modern flat design. The latest overused trend I've been seeing is the layering of a quote over a big ass full page cover photo,... props to the leonardo da vinci who can do that:
I'm a gay man, imagining a "most ideal woman" would give me the creeps 8-P
I had a long reply addresssing each of your points, but I'll keep it to the essentials:
- A beautiful woman composed from parts may be anatomically perfect, or can be a Frankenstein monster made of stitches of out-of-proportion body parts, even if every part is individually perfect. Knowing how to put together the parts into a harmonious whole is an art on itself - the art of composition. You can't dismiss this skill with "but it looks good in my mind". The difficult part is taking the nebulous, incomplete visual image in your mind and building a physical object that matches how you feel it should look. You speak as if this "execution phase" is trivial, but it's not; it's what distinguishes an artist from a wannabe.
> we have the instinctual knowledge of what looks good and what grabs attention and what improves UX. Thus almost anybody has what it takes to "Design" stuff.
- This is a fallacy. Being able to instinctively recognize whether a design is beautiful doesn't mean that you'd be able to build a beautiful one yourself from scratch. The first is easy as your brain is hardwired to do it; but the second is incredibly hard.
It's not the same to see that a Greek sculpture is beautiful, than to model a beautiful clay figurine with your hands. You'll know that your current wreck is not correct, but won't know of to change it to make it better. It's exactly the same when you try compositing individual elements into a proportional design. No matter how simple or complex are those elements, the skills required to make a good composition are the same, and they are not easy; it takes years to learn them and apply them properly. It's the reason why a professional designer can make better designs than a developer who learns all the photoshop commands.
Seriously, I think you're falling to the Dunning–Kruger effect; it seems that you don't even know what you're missing in terms of the quality of a design, if you think that any amount of basic elements can simply be thrown together without regards of the Gestalt laws of grouping[1] that govern your brain and are the basis of composition, even for very minimalist designs. The hardest part of art is not learning those mechanical techniques for making it photo-realistic, that you seem to value more than it's worth; it's learning these intangible rules and mastering them to make the result graceful.[2]
P.S. Learning to draw a photo-realistic image from life (i.e. looking at the object while you draw it) doesn't take years, it can be done in a few days with a good teacher; (metaphorically) half your brain is literally built for doing just that. You just need to learn how to shut down the symbolic other half of the brain which messes with the results. Betty Edwards Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain method[3] is a good way to do it on your own.
>Learning to draw a photo-realistic image from life
Did i say from life? I meant draw it from an imagined women in your mind through an imagined fish eye lens from an imagined extreme angle with perfect detail. Learning programming is easier than this...
> A beautiful woman composed from parts may be anatomically perfect, or can be a Frankenstein monster made of stitches of out-of-proportion body parts, even if every part is individually perfect. Knowing how to put together the parts into a harmonious whole is an art on itself - the art of composition. You can't dismiss this skill with "but it looks good in my mind".
I didn't dismiss this skill. Read my post again. I clearly separated design from implementation, the actual rendering of the woman (or man in your case). The design happens in your mind and is trivial almost instinctual, the engineering or rendering happens in reality. Design is easy because it happens in your imagination.
Implementing a modern design is even easier because of the minimal nature of the style and the canned graphics that are available for you to move around and resize.
>Seriously, I think you're falling to the Dunning–Kruger effect; it seems that you don't even know what you're missing in terms of the quality of a design, if you think that any amount of basic elements can simply be thrown together without regards of the Gestalt laws of grouping[1] that govern your brain and are the basis of composition, even for very minimalist designs. The hardest part of art is not learning those mechanical techniques for making it photo-realistic, that you seem to value more than it's worth; it's learning these intangible rules and mastering them to make the result graceful.[2]
These rules can be mastered in a week man. Also these principles are just formalizations of things that humans already instinctively know. No design can be thrown together willy nilly but any human can do it with effort not talent or skill.
> Design is easy because it happens in your imagination.
Your argument is contradictory. If having an intuitive sense of composition is enough to build a proportional design, having an intuitive sense of the human body proportions should be enough to draw one. Yet you recognize that drawing a body requires more skills than simply imagining it in your mind, so why don't you also recognize this need for building a design with a proper composition?
> Implementing a modern design is even easier because of the minimal nature of the style and the canned graphics that are available for you to move around and resize.
This is like saying that drawing the contour of a human body in a complex pose is easy because you have pen and paper, you don't need to extract the pigments from rocks nor prepare the parchment from calf's skin. Building a proportionate desing requires more than having access to the basic elements.
These would be the equivalences in the components for a design, and for a human body drawing:
* web components == lines and points
* building a web page == scribbling a sketch on paper
* building an ugly minimalistic design == drawing a stick figure
* building a proportional minimalistic design with a beautiful composition == drawing a realistic human body in any posture and perspective
What is a drawing of a body, but a composition of lines and shapes on a paper? Yet having an instinct on how a proper body looks like (and this instinct is a strong sense; any distortion triggers the "uncanny valley") is not enough for knowing how to put it in paper. In the same way, having an instinct for recognizing a beautiful composition is not enough to build a good design. Building a page by laying down "cover pictures, stock photos, fonts, geometric tools" is equivalent to drawing a stick figure. Yes, anyone can do it, but that's not the same as creating a succesful minimalistic design, any more than laying down some lines on paper to form a stick figure is making art. It could be art, but it requires some skill beyond merely dropping the basic shapes anywhere on the canvas. The proper implementation is difficult for the design as well, even if your imaginary mental image is perfect in your brain.
>> Gestalt laws
> These rules can be mastered in a week man.
Sure, the Gestalt laws can be learned in a week. In the same way, you can learn how to draw a basic canonic human figure with circles in an afternoon; and the laws of perspective are as simple as a vanishing point and some converging straight lines. But recognize than being a master in either takes much more than learning the theory. If all it takes to be a master is learning a few rules by rote memory, why aren't there any courses to "become a professional designer and start your design company in 7 days"? And why rendering a human body requires more skill than just knowing the basic shapes for each body part?
Both sites are slightly different in style and quality. The glaring issue with the site you gave me is quality control and a little less attention to UX and detail. Additionally, the site you gave me uses almost 100% canned design cliches while my site gets more creative with the interface.
These kinds of differences can easily be remedied by greater effort, not greater talent. Additionally most users won't even care or contemplate the difference as both interfaces are well past the "good enough" point.
At the fundamental level, the artistic concepts from both designs still relatively simple and literally almost identical: The composition of typography, stock photos and simple geometry.
I don't want to watch your minimal designs if you think that way.
The principles required to make a beautiful composition with minimal elements are exactly the same as those to create beautiful composition in a baroque setting. Conversely, a minimal design may also look like shit if done carelessly.