Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery French writer (1900–1944)
Minimalism is a word I’m sure you’ve heard before. It often gets thrown around on design blogs though sometimes carelessly as though the term just means to put less on the page.
In fairness minimalism can be a hard concept to wrap your mind around and it probably means different things to different people.
I want to explain why I think all web designers would do best to master minimalist design before any other style.
What is Minimalism?
I suppose we should start by trying to define minimalism. Here are 2 definitions I found online.
- Movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features.
- Simplicity of style in artwork, design, interior design, or literature, achieved by using the fewest and barest essentials or elements to maximum effect
Minimalism has also been called ABC art, reductivism, and rejective art and its theories have been applied to lifestyle.
Minimalism aims for simplicity and objectivity. It wants to reduce works to the fundamental, the essential, the necessary, and to strip away the ornamental layers that might be placed on top.
Minimalist designs tend toward more whitespace, better typography, grid layouts, and less color.
Mies van der Rohe famously said “Less is more” to describe his aesthetic sense of having every element serve multiple purposes both visually and functionally.
Buckminster Fuller later reworked the phrase to “doing more with less” and Dieter Rams changed it to “Less but better.”
All three are saying the same thing. Minimalism is about designing smarter.
Why You Should Master Minimalism First
If minimalism is about designing smarter, doing more with less, and reducing design to the fundamentals, it relies on getting basic design principles right.
You’re working with less so you need to be able to use the tools you have better. You need a solid grasp of:
While simplicity is used to define minimalism, it’s anything but simple to create a good minimalist design. To master minimalist design means to master design. It’s harder to pull off because you can’t hide behind ornament and decoration.
All minimalist designs should not and do not look alike. Minimalism does not mean take everything away until only black text on a white background remains. It means communicating as much as possible with as few elements as possible.
It strikes me that instead of a design being minimalist or not minimalist, it’s more a case of to what degree does the design embrace minimalism. We can strive toward it, but even the most minimalist design could be reduced further.
None of this should be taken to mean that every design should end up being minimalist. Different design styles set different moods and invoke different emotions in your audience.
Once you’ve mastered the fundamentals you can add meaningful aesthetics on top. Ornamentation works when it has a solid foundation to sit on.
Stylistic details won’t save a design that fails to execute the fundamentals.
Summary
Minimalism is reducing your work to the essential and using less to do more. In order to do minimalism well you need a strong understanding of basic design principles. When you master minimalism you master design.
I’ll leave you with a few quotes to hopefully drive the point home.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
— Albert Einstein
The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.
— Socrates
Omit needless words
— William Strunk Jr. The Elements of Style
Found (via Smashing Network RSS) this post just in time I needed it.
Thank you, Steven.
Not to be the funny guy here, but couldn’t this article have been cut down a bit to make the point a bit clearer?
Great article, without a doubt, regardless.
I knew someone was going to make that comment.
Believe it or not I actually thought of that while writing the post. I could have gone with the first paragraph in the summary and left it at that. I did cut quite a bit out while editing.
However if you read through some of my other posts you’ll realize that for me this post is minimalist.
This makes me think over my approach to designing future website projects. Thanks for sharing
Thinking is good. I think.
I really like the additions of the quotes, you added in this article. Maybe it help, a lot of people to create minimalism designs. In my eyes this is really the hardest target of a designer.
Thanks Erni. I like the quotes too. If you click the link right above the ones at the bottom there are more good ones.
I agree about minimalism being much harder than it seems to create. A minimalist design looks easy, but it’s not so easy to get right.
That’s what I try hard to do, but fail quite often.
Maybe it’s a skill that you need to master with time, but not all of a sudden.
It definitely takes time to master design principles and design in general. You aren’t going to master it all overnight, but you can study things one at a time and move towards minimalism.
When are you going to redesign this site?
I’m working on it now in between client projects. It’s going slowly, but it’s going.
Thanks! This makes me pause about my own design choices in the past. “More” isn’t always “Better”!
Glad to help Michael. More isn’t always better, though it can be at times depending on your goals.
My main point here is to start with what’s absolutely necessary first and then build up on top of that. How far you build up depends on your goals, but you have to get the foundation right if you want the house to remain standing.
Hi,
Thanks for this great article. It took me a long time to realise “less is more”.
I like your writing style by giving value and incorporating philosophical quotes
Thanks Nikhil. I’m glad you liked the post.
Indeed this is a good article I enjoyed reading it. I like the concept of minimalism because creating more is not always more. Following the principal of keep it sweet and simple has always been a good way to go!
This whole article was very helpful. I agree with the minimalism approach to web design. . . Actually it really applies (to me) in every day life! Thanks for the great read.
Thanks Jeff. I’m glad you liked the post. I tend to live a minimalist lifestyle too, though maybe not in every area. More minimal than most people though.
I actually am doing a fine arts project and I am going to attempt taking minimalism to a different level (hopefully)
Thanks for the article! Helped me lots
Thanks Klea. I’m glad you found the article helpful.