Category: Web Design

Yuna Kim

The purpose of minimalism is to expose the essence of a design by eliminating all non-essential forms, features and concepts. In web design, minimalism erases potential distractions and strips away elements into their most basic forms.

Yuna Kim‘s use of elementary shapes helps to organize her portfolio and goes perfectly with her personal logo. This minimal web site design experiments the use of geometric shapes that makes design so effective. The simplicity is also carried through the navigation making it enjoyable to explore.

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EXTRA

Italian furniture brand Extra, founded and directed by designer Henry Timi, has recently launched its website redesign. The beautifully executed website design is the result of Italian visual communicator Demetrio Mancini‘s work.

The Extra website features some wonderful minimal pieces by a design collective including Claudio La Viola, Federico Delrosso and Mario Nanni.

Mancini explains the design process behind Extra:

The biggest challenge working on the Extra website was to be coherent with the extremely minimalist philosophy of the brand founder Henry Timi. He asked for a very simple black and white website with a clear and consistently visible navigation interface.

Some of the finer details, such as the thumbnails of the products over the list of alphanumeric codes, or the inner zoom in the catalogue pages, added some dynamism and functionality to a rational and rigid structure.

With such pure and blissfully simple information architecture and style, the works of these furniture designers have been showcased superbly.

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It’s Almost…

New York based web design studio Type/Code have designed the very minimalist It’s Almost countdown tool website. The concept is very simple. You enter an event name, large or small, regardless of its importance and set the date and time. It then generates a web address for you to return to and see the simple and elegantly styled countdown clock. Even if an event name is exactly the same, the web address will be unique. To establish what time zone it is in, simply hover over the countdown text.

I love the look of this website, in particular the typeface and as a bit of fun, it works well.

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NowDoThis

We should have shared this on here much earlier. NowDoThis is so blissfully minimalist.

NowDoThis is designed by William Cotton and Jakob Lodwick (co-founder of Vimeo), they voice, “How do you organize your day? A calendar requires you to predict the unpredictable. a to-do list can overwhelm you with data. I wanted a ‘boss’ to tell me what to do.”

The end result is a form that sets out to do exactly what it states, absolute essentials, nothing gets in the way of what you’re originally setting out to do: the task at hand.

Its breathtakingly simple structure is so pure, which makes this one of my most used tools in my daily work.

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The Considered Ensemble

Here’s another way to think about fashion journalism, The Considered Ensemble by Andrew Kupresanin and Belinda Chen, displays the outfit selection of individuals around the world in a purely text based archive.

Think minimalist meets the Sartorialist. The contributors shares with us a description of what they’re wearing without images, leaving more to our imagination. Andrew Kupresanin says:

With the innumerable blogs competing with one another in showcasing the latest street fashion/fashionistas, we are bombarded with and consume so much imagery without getting past the surface. The Considered Ensemble is an alternative that hopes to fill some gaps.

Each submission is a personal expression from an individual, whether its the personality they inject into their writing style, or the stories behind a special item of clothing. It is a platform where visitors can gain a deeper insight into the thought process and meaning behind each individuals’ outfit, and take time to use their imagination.

A picture may say more than a thousand words, but words leave something to the imagination.

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Rebranding the Swedish Armed Forces

A project group of Hyper Island – Robbin Ingvarsson, Fredrik Holmberg, Kristina Herngren, Anke Buchta, Simon Schlüter and Waldemar Wegelin- rebranded the Swedish Armed Forces. They turned the usual function of camouflage around and used one of the basic shapes of geometry, the triangle, to create a new type of camouflage that is all about showing yourself. The goal is to reflect the diversity with the Armed Forces.

The focus for Swedish Army is peacekeeping abroad. In order to fullfill their missions they want to attract new talent – brain rather than muscles.

The challenge of the rebrand was to change the Swedish Armed Forces from a traditional defensive institute into a modern employeer.

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Simple Software

Fellow-minimalist Uri Fridman (who we know and love from his blog Minimal) launched a new site for his Simple Software: simple programs that do one thing, and do that in the simples way possible.

Such a minimalist approach to software deserves a minimalist website to support its proposition, and that’s what Fridman indeed created: a no-frills text-based design, listing the offer in simple typography.

A Design Film Festival website

This minimalist web design for the first edition of A Design Film Festival 2010 is from SILNT, the design studio of Felix Ng and Germaine Chong.

The festival website is designed in a single-page horizontal scrolling format – using just simple html and javacript. The result is a website that is lightweight, allowing it to load quickly without any unnecessary images, script and flash. The typography is set in large, glorious Helvetica – with all extra content neatly hidden away, until revealed by simply clicking the “read more..” links.

Our approach to the brief (as with all our projects) was to strip everything down to it’s simplest form – with as little design as possible. Instead focusing on the task at hand, to promote the films.

The other work in SILNT’s portfolio is also very good.

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Checkland Kindleysides

Checkland Kindleysides is a UK-based multi disciplinary design consultancy, specialising in retail interior design. What is most impressive however is their website, which was designed and developed by Sennep in London.

The site features lovely animations of unfolding paper cuts, combined with tasteful typography – truely a joy to the eye.

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Synoptic

Synoptic is a 3D interactive infographic based on a meteorological data set from Augsburg, Germany. Within the clean interface users can select environmental attributes to explore, alter time-spans, and detect patterns over time on a three-dimensional line graph landscape.

This nice piece of minimalist data visualisation is from Roland Lößlein, a 23 years old student of the Multimedia course at the University of Applied Sciences Augsburg. He is a freelance developer/designer for the web, besides his personal project We Ain’t Plastic.

Weather should no longer be only of interest when people have to choose the right clothes, plan recreational activities or find topics on conversation. With this interface he wants to call up the fascination for the dynamic and the complexity of weather and decided that it should be the main issue of his job, to motivate the user to recognise this.

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