Minimalist design

As designers, we all know that minimalist design is really brilliant. However, in the design process, we often feel something is missing because of using fewer elements, or make the final product look as if it is not finished.

so what is minimalist design? What is the way to make your design look simple and not simple? This article may help you.

What is minimalist design

Minimalist design is not strictly a visual style, but a design philosophy. On the basis of keeping the basic skeleton content, it eliminates redundant elements, decorations, colors and textures, which is a design process of simplifying the complex through continuous thinking. The result of this is to highlight the theme. Therefore, it is a concept rooted in the root of design thought.

Minimalism originated in Scotland. At that time, there was a wave of minimalism in various cultural fields: graphic design, architecture, music, literature, painting and so on. Until now, it has also begun to prevail in web design.

Although the minimalist design style has not been paid enough attention in the past ten years, it has never been seen in the early Internet field. Complex LOGO and advertisements, and colorful web design have always appeared in a bloated and complicated image.

Less is more

As mentioned before, the minimalist style is to show the theme directly and reduce the visual interference to the viewer. If there are too many elements in a page, users will fall into confusion because they can't decide their priority among many elements. An excellent minimalist design is bound to focus on the main content with an unbiased attitude.

For example, if any color appears in a web page with black, white and gray as the main color, it will become the visual focus. As shown in the following example, white as the background color, plus a little light background, with black characters, and corresponding pictures, the color performance of the pictures is concentrated on the model's clothing, which highlights the focus of clothing brands.

this design style allows users to focus on the texture, color and style of the clothing itself, thus easily locking the user's attention. At the same time, no decoration and elements are added outside the clothing itself, except for the main structure.

how to simplify the content

first of all, the designer should have a clear understanding of the content displayed on the web page. First, list the elements that need to appear on the web page, and then examine whether it is necessary to appear and whether it needs to be removed one by one.

This is a list of elements that I think we may need to think about whether we should not play.

social media icons

slogans and detailed introduction

some popular elements (such as sharing and praise, etc.)

a page has more than three parts

secondary elements in navigation

Of course, this is not a framework, and you certainly need to consider that you can't delete them all if necessary. Some elements that appear on the home page can be put into the secondary page. After all, if the homepage contains too much information, your users may also be "indigestion".

As a result of this streamlining, the functionality of your website may be a little weaker, but the redundant elements have been deleted to make it a simpler layout, which allows users to stay on your website for a longer time. And let users become websites that are willing to learn for them.

How to simplify the design

You need to constantly simplify any elements that appear, so that the texture disappears until it disappears, and there are fewer colors and simpler shapes. In short, this series of processing processes really makes your design a bit dull. But at this time, you should remember not to deviate from the direction of minimalism. You can focus your design on the focus content and make the focus content the only important visual core. Use some creative skills to deal with details.

Use elegant wireframe

As we all know, using wireframe can make your design look more "stable", because your eyesight is actually more useful than you think, and it will even remember every interval and every intersection, so any element that destroys the visual balance will be particularly abrupt, and your intuition will only tell you that it doesn't feel right. But this is actually the result of not using the wireframe well.

an appropriate wireframe is the prerequisite for the success of minimalist design. You can use it to get the right proportion and create an interesting visual balance.

You can draw your page layout and element style on the draft with 2B pencil at the beginning of design.

When drawing a wireframe, you need to follow the following order

1) Decide the elements that need to appear in your webpage

2) Order the elements in order of priority

3) Draw a wireframe sketch and try to achieve the best layout visual effect

Leave blank

In my opinion, leaving blank is a design material. Blanking is not the same as minimalism, but it is inextricably linked with minimalism design.

no matter how creative you are, a minimalist design will fail if there is not enough blank space. Therefore, when designing, you should consider that there is enough white space around each element.

For example, there are a lot of blanks around the LOGO part in the homepage of the above webpage, so that the LOGO itself can be displayed intuitively.

Make simplicity a habit

There is no denying that we have a bad habit of self-expansion. In design, too many things will be added unconsciously, because there is always a desire to "perfect" it in your mind. In view of this, we must get rid of this habit and form another good habit.

If you fall into a blind spot in your design and always feel that something is wrong "as if something is missing", then instead of focusing on adding more elements to the page, think about how to reduce more elements on the page.

finally, when you are satisfied with the design, see if you can further simplify the design. Patience is like pruning branches and leaves of saplings.