Minimalism Isn’t the Alpha and Omega of Design

http://designpepper.com/blog/post/minimalism-isnt-the-alpha-and-omega-of-design/

by joshuacc • 16 years ago

85 49 16 years ago

jamesbritt2• 16 years ago

'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.

joshuacc10• 16 years ago

"Depends on what is meant by "necessary"."

True. My reading was that a reductionist meaning was implied, though.

eagleal2• 16 years ago

> [...] 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).

jamesbritt2• 16 years ago

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

Aegean• 16 years ago

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.

joshuacc10• 16 years ago

"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." :-)

powrtoch• 16 years ago

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.

joshuacc10• 16 years ago

You're totally right. It's typically much better for developers to go the minimalist route. I just like keeping all design options open. :-)

bradendouglass• 16 years ago

On board with the both of you. In addition, minimalism in design often involves minute tweaks to make the overall better, easier, or whatever. This method is very reminiscent of how developers optimize code (should).

antonioono• 16 years ago

"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.

cageface• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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.

Nagyman2• 16 years ago

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.

joshuacc10• 16 years ago

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

Nagyman2• 16 years ago

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.

siglesias• 16 years ago

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.

sumeetjain2• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

>>>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.)

sumeetjain2• 16 years ago

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).

mbateman• 16 years ago

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.

joshuacc10• 16 years ago

You're correct that I could have used some better examples. But I'd been sitting on the article for a while and thought it was better to get it out than to keep holding it back indefinitely. :-)

alsomike• 16 years ago

But there's a sense in which minimalism is highly ornamental - it uses space, proportion and texture as ornament, rather than treating them as containers for ornamentation. Lots of designers shy away from minimalism because it's a very unforgiving style, and you need to be something of a perfectionist to get it right.

ilovecomputers• 16 years ago

Here's a designer that adds illustrations into his sites that even though serve no functionality, add character to his designs. I don't know what style it is, but it sure ain't minimalist, but it still is an enjoyable design, so you can add that to your list...maybe.

http://hugsformonsters.com/

ugh• 16 years ago

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.)

replicatorblog• 16 years ago

Modernism isn't really modern anymore. Look at Frank Gehry, he uses the materials of the International/Modernist school, but in a way that is much closer to baroque than modern. e.g. this building in Prague:

http://www.achievement.org/achievers/geh0/large/geh0-030.jpg

Also, it really depends on what kind of architecture you are looking at. "Modern" styles have been popular for skyscrapers, but that has as much to do with the structural requirements of a 300 story building as aesthetic intent.

If you look at most residential architecture, styles are much more homey even pushing the overwhelming opulence of baroque styles. The biggest builders in the US e.g. Pulte, Toll Brothers, don't even offer "modern" styles.

There is also a whole resurgance of the flowery stuff due to the rise in low cost custom manufacturing tools. I gave an Ignite talk on it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Tl7ZgZnhi0&feature=playe...

imd• 16 years ago

> 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.

jQuery

billswift• 16 years ago

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.

sdfx• 16 years ago

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

joshuacc10• 16 years ago

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.

ccc3• 16 years ago

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.

aero142• 16 years ago

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.

tel• 16 years ago

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.

ollysb• 16 years ago

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.

mechanical_fish• 16 years ago

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.

joshuacc10• 16 years ago

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.

rodion_89• 16 years ago

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

sp332• 16 years ago

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.

wdewind• 16 years ago

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.

metamemetics• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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

Minimalism Isn’t the Alpha and Omega of Design

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