Minimalism Isn’t the Alpha and Omega of Design

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

'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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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