As a designer or webmaster, you would have definitely heard about minimalistic web design, which became quite popular in recent years. Apart from the visual impact, minimalistic web design has many advantages including user-engagement, strain less view, faster loading etc. when compared to websites having high-end graphical elements and hundreds of colors at one glimpse itself. In addition, you can simply point out that such graphics-rich websites are hard to use and gives extra strain to your (for user as well) eyesight.
Hence, it is definitely a useful decision to implement minimalistic web design in your web design projects. Here, let us give you some tips for implementing minimal design elements and concept in your web project. Before jumping to those tips, you should know major advantages of using minimal design in your blog/site.
Contents
Advantages of Minimalistic Design
The Way We Use
Today, majority of successful web-based services seem to be using minimal elements in most of their sections. This is because minimal elements can bring a dramatic increase in usability of your site and hence attain user-engagement.
No Hard Codes
Unless you are a coding geek, you would love to code less. It is a proven fact that there will be fewer code lines when using minimal design concepts. For instance, you can skip tens or hundreds of color codes as you will be following a static pattern of background and foreground colors for one project.
Faster Loading Time
Apparently, websites with designing concepts other than minimalism take more time to load when compared to minimal ones. When you use minimal design concept, you do not have to bring heavy-sized graphical elements to browser screen. Through this step, you can reduce loading site of site.
Ways to Implement Minimal Design
Now, let us check out some useful tips for implementing minimal design concepts and regarding elements in your website or blog. We guess that minimal design will be more helpful for blogs as they have to impress users and hence force a comeback. Keep in mind that implementation of minimal design requires change in your whole website itself.
Confirm Support
Just as all other concepts you can find on web, minimalistic web design also has specific criteria for support. Some experiments have proven that following types of websites will not be suitable for bearing minimal design. Hence, you may try another concept for such websites.
- Ad-Oriented Sites: You might be using advertisements for monetising your websites. Hence, if your site is an advertisement-oriented site, you should not implement minimal design. The reason is that you will have to make the ads much colorful, which is not favorable for minimal concepts.
- You could not practically use minimal design if you are a professional theme designer, hired by some corporate people. In that case, you have to satisfy your customers as well. Moreover, if you are publishing one of your minimal design-based themes in a selling platform, there is a chance that you may see your theme under ‘basic’ label.
Add What You (They) Need
Before designing the whole website, you should understand some details about that website or blog. In addition, you should have a strong idea about the message you need to convey and the way you have opted to convey. There is no rule in design that the website must not have vacant space in it. Therefore, before you start including minimal elements in your site, you should remove unwanted elements from your website.
Say Everything in United Manner
You should define one pattern for all your design rather than combining tens of different colors and making it harder to understand. In simpler words, you should keep unity in whole project. You may change the color combination or typography in specific situations, where the element needs extra attention from user. It is always easy to pre-define the color-pattern and then make changes with respect to each element’s requirement.
Love Whitespace
In most of website using minimal concepts, you can see a large amount of vacant white space. This is a quite useful trick by designers to provide attention to all elements without messing up. Whitespace can effectively distinguish your different kinds of elements. This will surely increase usability of your site. Therefore, next time you design one website, do remember to leave enough white space. Negative space is one of the best tools you can find for minimalistic web designing.
Align Elements Correctly
Alignment of design elements is significant in making your site minimal. You should put mediocre space between each element to prevent messing up. You may a use a grid-based system for better alignment. You can attain this goal by sketching out the design roughly before actual design process.
Typography
This is where you can show your excellence in increasing the usability of one minimal website. You can use different typographies in your website without distracting user. Even though it may make some distractions to someone, it is completely negligible. When compared to usual images, use of different style and size in text content can help you to give more importance to specific text. For instance, you can styles like italic, bold etc accompanied with different font sizes in one website.
You May Love Color If
Minimalistic design never prevents you from using colored elements in your website. Instead, it puts a balance border of color and whitespace. Hence, if you do not want to miss your favourite colors, you may add them to the design, but only with some conditions. Apart from making your site look like a color palette, you should try to enlighten specific areas that require attention from user.
For example, you can give a colorful background for a sudden announcement or something important like that. Colors in minimal website should be for right navigation of user rather than attraction.
Be a User
Once you have completed the first part of design, you should stop being a ‘designer’. Instead, you should transform yourself to a user in order to analyze the usability of your product. When it comes to minimal design, as you know, usability has the optimum preference. By becoming such a user, you should be able to analyze how usable your site is! You can also try getting help from your friends or colleagues to rate usability of website. If you find something reducing usability, take no time to remove it.
Conclusion
We have listed some effective ways for implementing minimalistic design in your web projects. You have the ultimate choice to choose suitable ones from the list according to your requirement. For example, you do not have to leave that much whitespace in the case of a blog having minimal theme. Just like this, we prefer to check your requirement and category of project before making such changes. By the way, do you use minimal design in your projects? Do let us know via comments.
