Embracing Minimalism as a Web Designer

http://experimentgarden.blogspot.com/2009/12/new-minimalistic-design-for-experiment.html

by NathanKP • 17 years ago

31 26 17 years ago

experimentgarden.blogspot.com

selven• 17 years ago

For the website, I would recommend putting some of the non-content bits (links, buttons, login, etc.) on the side, not on the top. Studies have shown that reading is faster and more comfortable with narrower columns, and the 30-45 cm found in modern laptops is way too wide. There's nothing wrong with having a lot of vertical screen space though.

ThinkWriteMute4• 17 years ago

You know what I love? When some web designer makes my browsing area even smaller on my Netbook. I just love that.

est3• 17 years ago

21st century electronic systems can't even do fluid layout properly. How ironic.

ThinkWriteMute4• 17 years ago

Here's what you would have said if you wanted to be correct:

20th Century mark up languages are absolutely retarded for designing web pages and breed bad layout design.

Yeah, I know I'm going to get down-voted because people lurv HTML, but having had to whip it into shape lately this was totally worth it.

stan_rogers4• 17 years ago

Fluid layout isn't a problem -- line-length is. Anything beyond about 50 ems is too long for most people to read comfortably, and multicolumn layout will only work effectively if a spread of content can be restricted to a single screen before scrolling becomes necessary (ever read a multicolumn PDF with a minuscule typeface?). One can easily float the major elements around so that screen size can be accommodated, but allowing the text in any one container to expand beyond a usable width is poor design by any standard.

richcollins• 17 years ago

I think that my friend Steve has the best minimalist blog design that I've seen: http://dekorte.com/blog/blog.cgi

herdrick• 17 years ago

Very nice. But all those vertical alignments are bothering me. I think if he moved the text bodies of the posts to the left to align with the dates, it'd be better. Also, his posts are short so those titles and dates are dominating the page. Maybe making them smaller and making the titles the same shade of grey as the dates would help.

ThinkWriteMute4• 17 years ago

Related to the article but: Why is Blogger the red-headed step child of Google? I stopped using it recently because over the last 3 years it's barely changed. Posting a comment requires 3 page refreshes, 1 auto-scroll, and breaks the look of the website.

There are so many simple things Google could do to improve Blogger. Obvious things too.

stan_rogers4• 17 years ago

The comment problem is template-settable -- you don't need to go to the generic Blogger comments form. Mind you, the documentation is a little on the opaque side, and one really needs to be interested enough to go through all of the tags. The CAPTCHA time-out issue is a bit of a problem for longer comments for us slow typists (or, I suppose, for deliberate thinkers), and the only real answer for including background images is to base64-encode them in data URI on the stylesheet -- the browser will give up before getting them from the associated Picassa album about half the time if you use a URL as a src. Since the stylesheet is part of the page (not cached), that means the images need to be kept small -- good discipline, perhaps, but it ought to be a choice.

The only real missing link I've run across is the ability to create honest-to-goodness static content, something that won't show up in the blog archive -- although there are values available in the latest template tagset that indicate that something of the sort is at least under consideration. (At the moment, there is no way to intercept entry generation in the archive menu-writing loop, although you can use content tagging to rip a full-length or abstracted entry out of the normal page run.)

niyazpk3• 17 years ago

Just finished writing a minimalistic wordpress theme. The focus was to hide all the unwanted noise (categories, tags, rss buttons, ads etc) from the view and make the text highly readable.

Demo: http://clear.kera.la/2009/12/a-theme-for-wonderful-writers/

lsb• 17 years ago

Ryan Tomayko's theme is even more sparing; his name is the only hyperlink above the comments. See http://tomayko.com/writings/rack-cache-announce

niyazpk3• 17 years ago

My initial idea was to do something similar - do away with everything other than the article title + text and push everything else to the footer, but then I thought that it would be a radical design decision (as far a blog is concerned).

Will try to clean up a bit more.

andrewcooke• 17 years ago

nice. i don't know if this is any help, but something i played with recently is making parts of a page invisible until you mouse over them. obviously it only makes sense with certain use cases, but you might find it helps reduce things further.

(my example - http://www.acooke.org/ - where the links bottom left are intended only for my own use, as "bookmarks"; also i don't claim to be a designer - i'm a programmer - so please don't be offended by my relatively unsubtle design compared to yours...)

niyazpk3• 17 years ago

Good idea. It makes sense in many cases. I will try that too.

BTW I am not a designer myself. I am a programmer.

NathanKP4• 17 years ago

I like it overall, though it does seem a little bit too bright. Perhaps the text needs to be darkened a bit so that there is more contrast.

edd• 17 years ago

"As mentioned earlier more people are using iPhones, net books, and other portable devices for viewing the internet. The future of internet browsing will probably involve smaller screens, and thusly larger fonts should, in my opinion, be adopted."

Really? Why don't you stop sizing everything exactly an use a relative measure. Surely it is the job of the device to chose how big a letter should be displayed. One of my biggest frustrations with the web is how long it is taking to get to a point where we can stop using bitmaps to build sites.

NathanKP4• 17 years ago

I didn't use bitmaps in the site design, only in the article. All the fonts (unless I missed a few) have sizes defined as a percentage so that the device can choose a base font size and I can modify it from there.

Embracing Minimalism as a Web Designer

Related Stories