How To Achieve Minimal Website Design

What exactly is minimal design?

To practice minimal design, it would be a good idea to refresh your memory of what constitutes it. The design trend started in the 20^th century and is still popular to this day. It sees design stripped back and content displayed in a minimal form. A designer with this in mind will strip away anything that is not needed and to leave only what is absolutely necessary. However, every designer will have slightly different visions of what minimal design consists of. How you go about applying minimal design to your website will of course depend on your content.

Why?

A lot of people will ask why minimal design? The reasons go far beyond a matter of personal taste. It’s an effective way of displaying information simply and enable the viewer to process content almost immediately with less distractions. Good minimal design will really stand out while looking modern and professional. This is perhaps why global businesses such as Google opt for minimal design every single time.

Content

The content on your website will need to be reviewed when applying a minimal design. Write down or take note of the content you need starting with the most important. For example, title, introduction, logo etc. Cut out anything that is not essential without affecting the function of your website. There is also content that can be minimised as opposed to being cut out altogether. You could combine your Services and About section or add your social media links to your Contact page.

Layout

Creating a wireframe for your website will help you to structure your site accordingly. Use your list of prioritised content and start sketching out what needs to go where. You’ll need to consider the relationship between what is important and the positioning on your site. This is a great way to visually preview what is likely to work and what isn’t. Create a few wireframes so that you have options.

Use online grids and rulers to align the information on your site so that it looks neat and structured.

Design

It’s very easy to end up with a boring looking website when trying to achieve minimal design. To avoid this there should be a focal feature of your website. This will make it much easier to design and achieve the look you want while keeping you focused. For example, it could be a main image or a piece of text. Take a look at the McDonald’s website and how they achieve minimalism through their focal features.

Avoid using multiple colours, textures and fonts. Typography is crucial in minimal website design. The font should be simple and easy to read. Use different sizes of fonts to display the emphasis on different pieces of information.

Whitespace is a given with minimal design. However, you’ll still need to consider white space in relation to your text and images. Think of it as adding a little extra space around each element on your page.

For this type of design it’s probably best to work in stages. Treat content, layout and design as separate tasks making sure you review what has been done after each stage. This will help you stick to your brief.

Images

One important thing to bear in mind is to make sure your images are high-resolution and look sharp. A poor quality or even average image will bring the whole design of the website down. As there are less components on a minimal website they will feature more prominently. If there is something that isn’t up to scratch it’ll show up even more against the minimal design.

How do you know if you’ve gone too minimal?

You’ll know that you’ve gone too minimal as soon as you start sacrificing usability. Your website still needs to function effectively and not look too confusing to your visitor.

Inspiration

Finally, take some inspiration from some other minimal website designs. There are so many great minimalist websites out there which you can learn from and incorporate into your own designs.

Here are a few that BaseKit have picked out: