I think minimalism gets a lot of flack for how many sites don’t utilize them correctly, sucking the soul out of the design.
Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with minimalism. It lets others focus on the content with limited graphic elements bouncing all over the place, it’s much easier to process the information. Even as someone who isn’t into minimalism, I can see the benefit of it.
But it can also be uninteresting and boring to look at, especially when you see almost EVERY site with similar layouts and colour palettes. So I want to remedy that by letting others link websites that are unique yet organized. Show me sites you think that does the minimalistic style justice and has fun with it!
A site that I think is great and full of personality, despite being exclusively text-based, is from the one and only, m15o’s nightfall.city. Honestly the rest of their projects too are great examples of minimalism. I still get immersed with the atmosphere just from the ASCII text pictures and font choices. They’re top tier in my opinion.
Each post on webcurios [ Note that some of the images on that site are NSFW ] is mostly a bulleted list of links and the author’s thoughts about each one. Minimalism is an effective design choice because it puts the focus on the linked-to sites.
I am really into minimalism, not so much as a graphic design guideline but more on the level of functionality, intention, that sort of thing. A source of inspiration I keep coming back to is the Low-tech magazine website. It runs on a solar-powered computer in Spain. The stylesheet is super simple and yet I don’t feel like it compromises on design that much, it still looks and feels like a publisher’s website. It has interesting features like the background colour indicating the level of battery power and the use of highly dithered images.
I too like maximalist designs, but I do think minimalism is often overlooked
I’ve checked out some of the sites that are linked and my favourites would have to be platinum tulip and pixel glade. Theyre simple, yet fun to look at
That is a wonderful concept and it’s so pleasing to look at, I especially love that the images have limited colour palettes and use dittering. It actually reminds me of the Gameboy Camera images, just with more details
I’m not entirely certain, but would the following directory of sites fall under the ‘maximalist’ flag? Brutalist Websites. Sorry, not really sure of the relationship between brutalist and maximalist.
These are a bit all over the place, when looked at purely from the spectrum of minimalism vs. maximalism, I’d say.
The bare-bones nature of many of these brutalist designs kind of falls in with minimalist designs, but they aren’t limited by the core philosophy of “less is more”. The sites that adhere to the core tenet of maximalism (that more is more) also don’t necessary share the sort of designs people would generally associate with maximalist design.
To add gasoline to the flame: I think it’s important to distinguish between functional and aesthetic minimalism. Many modern web apps, while looking flat and boring, can’t be called minimalist when it comes to the sheer number of buttons on the screen. Just look at Reddit or something. On the flip side, it’s totally possible to make a website with a minimalist structure but a maximalist appearance. That’s what I did, in fact ;)
Hmmm I would say brutalism is sort of unrefined and blunt/blocky regardless of complexity of visual design. Like Coby said the sites there appear to range from minimalist to maximalist. For example I would consider this japanese shop to be rather minimalist with a plain white background and flat red text/accents. Theres an image for each featured item but otherwise no decorative images/textures/colors. On the otherhand this studio page appears to be more maximalist with a lot of closely packed textures, graphics, and animations.
I would call something maximalist if the visual design has a lot of accents/images/textures/decoration. If the design is “busy” (maybe even distracting) its probably maximalist. I would call dollarchive on neocities maximalist due to all the detailed borders, boxes of content, and busy background. mani is a good example of a very maximalist personal site.
All in all I would define maximalist as decorative and minimalist as simple (visually). Minimalist designs emphasize the content as the most import thing (the design should be intuitive and near “invisible”), where as maximalist designs treat the visual design itself as worth emphasizing. Its like a clean simple window versus a stained glass window.
(Apologies if I explained things you already know, I just like explaining things ^^;)
I love love love the simple designs via Bear Blog or Smol.pub, usually done with classless CSS files. I always bounce back and forth between loving minimalist and maximalist type sites. I think it’s why I need at least two for myself, main site, big and bright, blog site, smaller and minimal and clean.