The Nouveau Minimalism

Clean, fresh, inspiring, and looking good on any device – those are the characteristics of the world’s favorite websites right now…

At the start of the year, everyone from independent web designers to future forecasting sites like Econsultancy were predicting that 2014 would be the year of nouveau-minimal websites. And they were right. Here are a few tips on how to get in vogue with the less-is-more approach and a few examples of who is doing it really well…

The Vogue Layout

Websites are increasingly designed for users to keep scrolling down, with information delivered in a stream, eliminating the need for users to click on links to take them to other pages. Often, a scrolling site will have links, but if you click them, you’ll just be moved down to the relevant spot. This works best with sites designed to present something, rather than those that need to hold lots of content. Good examples include the artist portfolio for London photographer Virginie Litzler, and the website presenting the app of London mobile payment startup Spleat.

Flat Design

While a previous design trend known as “rich design” had web features that seemed to be lifting off the page, “flat design” is the opposite. This basically means there are no textures or gradients, or any other design tricks that make the elements on the website look three-dimensional. The result is a cleaner and more minimal website. Apple’s iOS7 for iPhone, which Apple described as “an experience that was simpler, more useful, and more enjoyable”, is a good example of this.

The evolution of flat design could be seen as a product of changing consumption habits. It could be viewed as the industry’s reaction to a shift from a device segregated experience to a more closely interconnected experience with responsive design and web apps, etc. With the previous schools of design and their heavy use of textures, gradients and other visually complicated components, it was significantly harder and often impossible to predict how certain elements would react to being condensed or resized to fit on a smaller screen. The move to flat design allowed better use of .SVG files (Scalable Vector Graphics) that could predictably adopt to any screen size on the fly.

Promiscuous Design

People look at websites on their desktop computers, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones – they all have different size screens and the websites needs to look good on all of them. Adaptive web design means that the page will change to fit a predetermined set of screen and device sizes. Similarly, responsive web design means creating a website that will fluidly change and respond to fit any screen or device size.

In the same spirit, graceful degradation is the practice of creating a website that takes advantage of the best devices and browsers, but with added handlers for less-fancy devices so it will look good there too. Progressive enhancement is the opposite of this, where the web designer starts by designing for the basic versions, adding enhancements for the devices which can handle them.

Uncluttered Pages

Sometimes this means lots of white or plainly colored space, so the eye is drawn to the correct areas, that being the sparse bits of text. The result is often a site that feels fresh, clean and inspiring. This Happened, an interactive design event organizer, is an example of a minimalist site that still manages to pack in a lot of information. Another good example is the recently redesigned website for the Serpentine Gallery.

Other times, this trend also means having a large photo that covers the screen, so you have to scroll down or click through to see the content. A number of online publications, such as Medium and Buzzfeed Longform, are using this technique to create an uncluttered space for people to read longer stories.