How Can a Minimalist Web Design Attain Appealing Results?

Minimalist design is one that could let you get rid of any unnecessary features, colors, forms, and textures. The ultimate goal is to make the content shine out and become the focus of attraction. The minimalist design intends to relax and limit the mind of the visitor to its most basic elements.

The design movement started in Switzerland and spread across a wide range of media, including graphic design, architecture, music, literature, painting, and, more recently, online design.

Although the minimalist design has been popular for decades, it was not evident in the early days of the Internet. Website designs used to be crowded and intimidating even without the revolving logos, marquees, and bright colors. Things have changed significantly in the past one decade, with today’s designs becoming more appealing, customer-centric, and simple.

Less is more!

As you are already aware, minimalism focuses on the most important content and decreases user distractions. Too many elements on a webpage might end up confusing the viewers about where to look. They will misinterpret the significance of each component, which could backfire for your business. As per the modern day minimalist design, the information should acquire the center stage.  

For example, any splash of color on a black-and-white design is sure to enthrall the user’s attention. The color itself steals the limelight. Let’s elaborate this with an example:

This type of design is certainly familiar to you: a basic white backdrop, one block of content, and one visual element. It focuses on all the graphic elements including color, texture, and shape. More content on this page would have made this visual element less obvious and relevant due to its complexity. The designer has struck the correct balance by keeping the content to a bare minimum. Evidently, it goes a long way in establishing the designer’s brand and identity.

How to Minimize Content?

The primary step in designing a minimalist design, or simplifying a layout, is to reevaluate the content and strip it down to the essentials. Only then will the page’s most significant pieces have the desired effect. Write out what content you will need, just like you would for almost any website: a logo, an introduction, navigation, and so on. Remove everything extra that isn’t completely essential. Remove as much as you can.

Here are some elements that you probably don’t need. But keep in mind that this is only a suggestion. Your design plays a big role in determining your specific needs. Some of the elements on this list may or may not be necessary for your website.

• Social networking icons or images, or perhaps a social media section at all
• Taglines, as well as further descriptions or introductions
• Lists of “Featured,” “Popular,” and “Recent” (including Twitter and RSS feed lists)
• Pages containing more than three primary sections (for example, “Introduction,” “About,” and “Services”) are often more complex.
• Pages for the secondary navigation

The goal here is not to make the website less useful, but to eliminate unneeded features. You should highlight the important ones or combine parts into a more straightforward structure. An important example in this context would be to combine your social network connections into the “About” or introduction section. You could also break up the content into several pages to give each one more attention.

When Over-Designing Becomes a Routine

Over-designing may become a bad habit. It hardly matters how hard you try to make design simple, it always ends up looking cluttered and complicated. To correct this, developing new habits would be a great move.

Try going through the suggestions above before each job to make sure you remember them. Concentrate on one habit at a time. Before going on to white space, try to focus on eliminating and streamlining the content. If you are in a tight place and thinking, “Something’s missing,” consider taking anything out before adding something new.

Every element of minimalism demands a unique skill set. The more you apply these concepts to your designs, the easier they will become. If you want to take it a step further, look at the completed product after using the approaches taught here and find out if you can discover ways to make it even simpler.

During the design process, you may concentrate on regions where you were unclear, and you could ask other designers to bring out features you may have overlooked.

What more can you do to ensure a Minimalist Web Design?

Of course, there is much more that you could do to develop maximum appeal for your website with as little experimentation as possible. For best results, it would be great if you could refer to other sites that do things well and try to find out the answers to several questions like:

• Why do their websites work better?
• Why are their websites more successful than yours?
• How is their website design different? 
• How do they benefit from a minimalist design and how can you benefit as well?

Compare all the results and responses and try to make good design decisions accordingly. Remember that every additional extra time you spend on your design will make you get a usable, appealing and functional website for your visitors.

Wrapping Up!

Even today, many people believe that minimalism is simply a style of design. While this is broadly true, minimalism has its range of operations. Once you figure out how to use minimalism to its maximum potential, you can use it to develop the finest website design.

It will serve as a strong communication tool between you and your audience and an aesthetically attractive website that people will want to visit. You should understand that it is not possible to have complete creative control over every design job. Hence, a better and recommended approach would be to engage with your clients to strike a balance. It is great if you have an in-house team to create a simplistic design. However, outsourcing the best web designers to work on your task would always be advisable and preferred.

If you found this interesting, have any questions, or would like to learn more, our Branding Agency in Dubai can help, please drop us a line at puneet.ae