Minimalism is now ubiquitous in web design, and for good reason. Its lightweight layout and low maintenance costs make it flexible and suitable for responsive design. Natural elegance is very beautiful, which makes many brands and organizations favor and adopt. Admiring this style of design is not the same thing as creating it.
It seems that, with so few elements of minimalism, it’s much easier to replicate a style. In fact, the opposite is true. With so few elements available to the designer, creating a minimalist design often requires more thought and effort.
Image Source:Keecker.
This article will explain how to take full advantage of the benefits of minimalist design. We can quickly determine if minimalism is appropriate for your website design by following the criteria below, and then drill down to do best practices as you need to collaborate with subsequent technical discussions.
Is minimalism right for your site?
As recommended by the free ebook Web Design Book of Trends 2015-2016. Minimalist design is not the best choice for every website. While this technique is great for simple business organizations like firm websites and creative resumes, it can get tricky for more complex sites.
http://www.apple.com
Let’s take a look at some common web minimalism issues:
1. Too much content: Sites like ebay or Amazon require a detailed interface that supports multiple content categories, so a minimalist interface is not the best choice. However, these sites still apply some of the principles of minimalist design, such as hiding content when you don’t need it.
2. Too much advertising: In general, external advertising and minimalism do not coexist well. Minimalism is accurate and detailed, and if you can’t figure out what kind of ads will be placed on your site by an external AD server, your entire design can be disrupted by trivial elements, such as the color of the AD image. Even if the AD is pre-programmed, it can still become a redundant element of your design.
3. Sites for kids and young adults: Younger viewers may be bored by minimalist design and often prefer more visually stimulating sites that may even include some audio.
Compared to other styles, minimalism has a certain style standard, and you need to think carefully before you decide to use it.
Best practices for minimalism
Check out these valuable minimalism guidelines:
1. Landing pages only: For some content-rich sites, having too few elements is not an advantage. In this case, a better option is to create a minimalist landing page that serves as a portal to a more complex site.
2. Clean Design: “Cut out unnecessary words” is great writing advice in general, and even better for minimalist design. When working on a design, imagine you’re Hemingway writing
3. Pay attention to the top space: According to users’ browsing habits, place high quality content with enough negative space at the top of the page, and gradually increase the content density as you scroll down the page.
4. Keep it interesting: Boredom is always a threat to minimalism, so change your layout to attract users further and alternate zigzag patterns can help with reading.
5. One Concept per page: The gist of clean design, each page/screen is centered around one vision and focused on one concept.
6. Less than or equal to five sections: It is best to have no more than five sections, otherwise cut them down.
7. Go from simple to complex: It’s best to start with a black and white framework and then slowly add elements such as color to it. This will help you figure out what is necessary and what can be left out.
If you’re new to minimalist design, it can be a painful choice. Below we made a list for beginners.
1. Essential elements — logo, navigation options, body content, contact information
2. What can be left out — social media links/ICONS, footers, widgets (especially lists, like most popular hits).
On the plus side, the more you get into minimalism, the more intuitive you’ll become about what can be left out. Separating essential and redundant content elements is a skill that all design styles require (not to mention anything outside of your life or work).
Minimalism and other design styles
Part of the beauty of Minimalist Design article is about how minimalism works well with other design styles. Think of minimalism as an attribute, and it can add or combine other styles and techniques to play up its strengths and avoid its weaknesses.
In particular, with today’s popular mobile devices and reloaded animations, minimalist design offers a way to ensure quality while reducing maintenance costs. Therefore, minimalist design is often used with other styles of design.
1. Flat design
Minimalist design and flat design work well together because both emphasize simplicity. The same is abandoned a lot of design skills and focus on the content, the basic style of flat design itself, in fact, is extremely simplified design.
2. Hero titles and pictures
Regardless of glossy flat designs, real and large-size photographs are becoming more widely used. With such a large number of attractive images naturally becoming the focal point of the screen, combining them with a minimalist design prevents distracting too many users.
Easy navigation
In other words, you can simplify your navigation to a burger button (three horizontal lines on the top left), and when you need to display the entire navigation, just click or mouse over it.
While this approach is the fastest strategy for a pure minimalist design, it is not recommended for all sites — this simplistic navigation makes it harder for users to find navigation, so it is not a good way to engage users on unfamiliar pages.
4. Artistic typography
Because text is always an integral part of minimalist design, typography is crucial. It is also one of several ways to create a more personal and appealing minimalist website.
conclusion
Minimalist design has many advantages, such as reduced load time and is more suitable for responsive design, which is worth studying. If your design meets all of the criteria mentioned above, try reimagining your site with fewer elements, just as an exercise. You will find that many of the elements you once felt necessary can also be omitted.
For more tips on minimalist Design, such as nine other current Web Design Trends, check out the free ebook Web Design Book of Trends 2015-2016. There are 166 manually selected above example: such as Adidas, intercom, Apple, Google, Versace and so on. There are also 100 collected resources to help you improve your design.
Please forgive the first translation for its rigidity and inappropriateness
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