Corporations AND designers all over the world are switching to minimalistic, simple design
The web sure has gone a long way from it’s humble beginnings of blue, underlined links, serif fonts, animated GIFs (they now exist as something completely different) and patterned backgrounds. Well now we are seeing a rapid increase of so-called ‘minimal design’. The idea is to have a simple, once color background (preferably white). Gradients and textures are generally frowned upon. The site’s palette should consist of only a couple colours, and using more than two (or three) fonts is prohibited.
Everything is super readable, clear and well … minimalistic. That in turn gives the main purpose of the web a boost – to consume content, both video, text and imagery. Everything is easier to access and these sites generally load faster too.
It made me think about a trend in web design agencies to over-fancy everything. Sure, Flash is now a rare thing on professional websites, but even without it, the tendency is to use patterns, colors, gradients and fonts to create something that screams “RICH”. And by rich I mean that “We have everything here” kinda rich. In most cases such sites feature very little content themselves, so they need to be filled with images, gradients and curves just to look “full” of something.
It’s not a bad thing, but certainly the new path is better. Less is more might now sound like a long dead slogan, but it’s as applicable today, as ever. Besides, minimal websites can also scale well on mobile devices (and load faster on them). Everybody wins?
Well not necessarily – as soon as the customers (mostly the ones who have a marketing department) realize the trend is to “minimize the graphics”, they will demand it on their sites and that could shift the focus from companies making “Rich sites” back to the smaller studios.
And no, minimal websites don’t have to all look the same. By minimal I’m not saying a site with a header and some text with one image and maybe a black line here and there. But losing gradients and shapes can actually help creativity. Results may vary, but we’re seeing them take light. There will be more.