Minimalism isn’t exactly a new trend. In the art and design world, it first began to develop way back in the 1950s, with artists like Frank Stella, who is credited with being the “father of minimalism.”
Today, minimalism as a practice has spread into other aspects of living, influenced by a generation overwhelmed by the sheer number of things that surround us.
Minimalism continues to be reflected in design, especially digital design. Although the movement already has a long and storied history, minimal design pops up in many lists of popular design trends of today.
Why has this particular trend been so enduring?
Why Minimal Design Is Popular
If you’ve taken classes in any sort of creative art, from graphic arts to product design to creative writing, your educators likely pounded in the idea of “less is more.”
Our tendency may be to complicate things, but as an audience to a piece of creativity, we respond well to simplicity.
In terms of graphic design, minimalism can go hand in hand with good design and overall great user experience.
As minimalistic trends tend to be influenced by our reaction to the over-complicated layers of life, minimal design can be beneficial to user experience in more ways than one.
Properly executed, it can reduce the frustration caused by information overload. And it helps the design audience to pinpoint the information they need, without distraction. On another level, it can also be incredibly appealing as a visual choice.
Aesthetics of Minimal Design
With design of any kind, it can be easy to get stuck in the rut of creating complicated visuals. Design is about appealingly conveying information, and traditional design often utilizes a wide range of graphic elements. Because of the differences in trends and schools of design, these elements often don’t even need to “match,” per se. Eclecticism, for example, is another popular trend in design.
Design focused on minimalism, on the other hand, celebrates the “less is more” ideology.
Ideally, this results in a clean, easy-to-process design that is appealing to the eye without being overwhelming to the other senses as in the case of logo design.
This type of design is increasingly seen in large layout formats, such as two-page spreads in magazines, or website design.
But it also pops up in other aspects of design, such as logo design and marketing.
The look of minimal design allows for a layout with one central focus, without using a lot of “extras” to fill in the background, and often without even giving context to the piece. It’s designed on a “need to know” basis, in which the elements are stripped down until absolutely nothing extraneous to the piece remains.
“Extraneous” can be defined in different ways, of course. Minimal design does not need to mean ugly or unadorned design.
It simply indicates that each element used in any given piece is carefully chosen to contribute to the message behind the piece, and is removed if not necessary.
Minimal design is a curated design.
How To Utilize Minimal Design
As an example, well well-executed minimal design makes good use of negative space, or whitespace, within the design.
Using whitespace effectively gives the design a built-in component to add a level of intricacy without actually adding an extra element.
This lends an elegant simplicity to a design, allowing the viewer to focus on the main points of the image while still giving another layer of interest to the design as a whole.
Minimal design makes judicious use of the following elements:
- Negative space or whitespace. This space is often played up far more than in non-minimal design and becomes an important element in minimal design pieces.
- Textual content. When type is involved in minimal design, it’s often used as a standalone piece, without accompanying graphics. But typefaces can also be adapted and personalized to fill the role of a graphic, combining two potential elements of design into one and thereby reducing the complexity of the piece. A good example of this would be a lettermark logo for Pandora Radio, in which a blocky, filled-in P is itself the graphic for the logo.
- Black and white is often the go-to choice for minimal design, and that is an effective, distinguished option. However, using color as a highlight can still produce a minimal design.
Minimalism and User Experience
As we mentioned, minimal design does show up on several lists of the most popular design trends for the coming year. And this includes design centered around UX, such as web design.
There’s a great reason for this.
User experience in web design is focused on ensuring that you create a usable website. Your audience should be able to find the information they need without being frustrated by a poorly designed navigation system. The pages themselves should be easy to read, appealing to look at, and follow web accessibility guidelines.
With all of those considerations going into web design, it’s no wonder that more and more websites are centered around a minimalist look.
The “less is more” way of design means less clutter to a site, more whitespace for ease of reading and processing visual information, a well-defined navigation system, and a visual hierarchy.
Minimal design reacts well to being highly organized, and for good UX, that’s ideal.
When Minimalism Goes Wrong
On the other hand, not all minimal design is created equal.
We’ve been very positive about minimal design up until now. But that doesn’t mean that minimalism minimizes mistakes, necessarily.
Minimalism can highlight poor design if it isn’t handled well. For example, say that you’ve designed a set of graphics for use on a new website, but the graphics themselves aren’t entirely up to snuff. A site centered around those poorly designed graphics, without other aspects of design, wouldn’t be all that enticing to navigate.
Or say that the technical aspects of your UX are lacking. Links are broken, or images aren’t loading correctly. Minimal design won’t help the fact that your viewers can’t navigate where they want to go.
If minimalism is taken too far, especially in the case of whitespace, it can give the impression that the site is under construction and that things are missing entirely.
On top of all of that, there are times when minimal design just isn’t the right design choice to make. This choice is in the purview of the designer, of course, but some genres call for a richer design. Ecommerce sites with a lot of products to offer, for example, benefit from simplicity and navigability but may need more than a truly “minimal” design to best present the products.
Keep It Simple
In general terms, design can often go by the same oft-quoted axiom for dressing well: before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take off one thing.
While that advice is often ignored by those of us who love accessorizing, it’s even more suited to design. Good design is almost always enhanced by opting for simplicity. And minimal design is, at its core, incredibly simple.
Minimal design gives the designer a chance to simplify the message presented by the design. It gives the audience the best opportunity to comprehend and act on the information received. It often is an appealing aesthetic choice that puts the focus where it needs to be, opening the door to a great user experience.
On the flip side, just because there are fewer elements to mess up in minimal design doesn’t mean that success is guaranteed. And, at times, minimal design just isn’t the right aesthetic choice or tone for a certain project or piece of design.
So, while minimal design is a favorite trend of many designers across many genres and outlets, that doesn’t mean that it’s automatically the right decision. As with any other design choice, opting for minimalism requires forethought, knowledge, and balance.
