minimalist design

There is a growing collection of minimalist web sites garnered mainly from user submissions. Some of the sites are very usable too, but I must point out that minimalism and usability are not synonomous even though they often work well together.

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  1. I must agree again with you, while they are working well together, I do not think that usablle and from artistic point of view – atractive web site is something not possible.

    Comment by Sandra on July 18, 2002 @ 1:55 am
  2. yea right… minimalism, if done well, is all ABOUT functionality and design working well together. You take out all the extra, unneccesary frills and focus the user at what’s important. It’s elegant, intuitive, natural.

    Comment by f220 on March 11, 2003 @ 9:43 am
  3. f220: You speak as if minimalism was a term invented for web pages. This is not so; it’s an art/lit term used to describe a movement towards extreme simplification of form and color. As applied to web pages, it refers to the layout, color scheme, and other presentation aspects of the page. The actual usability of the page is different, but not entirely disjoint, from the ‘minimalist’ aspect of it.

    Any web design should have functionality and design working well together, it’s not particular to minimalist design.

    Comment by Levi on March 11, 2003 @ 10:34 am
  4. Actually you could pretty much take that sentence and contort it to any application of minimalism… when I wrote it I was thinking more about two breeds: furniture design (for some weird reason) and graphic design. It’s true that any design SHOULD have functionality and design co-existing, but minimalism arose around the idea of making art functional and intuitive, yet still expressing concept.
    What I was commenting on was the other poster who said it’s ‘impossible’ to combine the two – which is just… wrong…?

    Comment by f220 on March 11, 2003 @ 10:19 pm
  5. I do not think that usable and from artistic point of view – atractive web site is something not possible.

    I believe you misunderstood Sandra. The way I interpreted it was she does not think having a usable and attractive web site is not possible. In other words, she thinks it is possible.

    Comment by dan on March 12, 2003 @ 9:03 am

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