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Comment by blehn | Hacker News Reader

The problem with this article (other than the usual SM lack of substance) is that almost all the examples are portfolio sites for artists and designers. How about showing these principles applied to more complex projects - applications, e-commerce sites, corporate sites, admin systems, etc?

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This is the problem with most SM articles and with most web design sites in general. I say this as someone who is featured in this post. Portfolio sites have a perfect reason to be minimal: the work comes first.

But that's what you get from an article that takes an aesthetic and works backwards — the exact opposite of a good design process.

I think at least 80% of the links in this article have been featured on SM before, actually.

Source: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/04/25/55-minimal-black-...

Web design is basically communications design, on the Internet; it doesn't involve functional aspects (just reading, and finding/clicking links to enable more reading.) When you're designing a web app—industrial design, on the Internet—you're just doing UI design, and a good UI book will help you more than anything with "web" in the title.

I am also enjoying the irony of SM writing an article on minimalist design, when their site is the complete opposite.

They neither claim to have a minimalist website nor do they claim that being minimalist is always right.

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