I love minimalist website designs for three reasons. Firstly, done well they look great. Secondly, good minimalist design is always about the content. Thirdly, I find minimalist websites easier to read and navigate. Minimalism is definitely a preference, and obviously not suitable for all clients. Here are a few of my favorite minimalist websites.
A Website Built For Content
One thing I’ve never really understood is why website designers build websites before they have received all of the content from the client? I think the process for this is wrong and ultimately hurts both the client and the designer.
Content, they say is king – and it really is, yet these days it does not seem to be the most important thing we consider when we approach a website design. Both designers and clients often get hung up on all sorts of other details such as accessibility, user experiences, graphic design or html & css validation – and whilst ignoring these sorts of things can detract from the success of a website I think we need to start putting a bigger emphasis on generating content.
I’ve worked on a broad range of different web projects as both a developer and designer, and in the overwhelming majority of cases I’ve had to build the website with little or no content. The most common reason for this is that the client just isn’t ready to provide that content yet, and often promises to work on it whilst we develop the design and CMS. However, I think that working together in this way can limit how good the end result will be, because the designers are going to have to create a design based upon the content that they have asked for rather than the content they actually receive.
And in case you missed it that is the reason for me writing this article because it forces the designer to generalize their design.
The thing is that designers rarely create completely original designs, as with any other art form, they rely heavily on their influences and are often employed because of their ability to be influenced by others. When I create websites for myself I usually have nearly all of the copy and images compiled before I begin the design. This influences the way I choose colors and fonts that work really well with my content. Working in this way could actually reduce the cost of the project because it provides an initial starting point for the designer, and getting the initial inspiration for a design can be time consuming.
So as of now I’m going to start steering my future clients towards fully completing the information architecture and content stage of the project, providing me with a really good selection of complete articles and pages that are ready for publication. As well as (hopefully) encouraging a better website design from me, some clients will discover early on in the process that they actually find it quite difficult to produce the content and I can then help them to develop a really good content generation process.
RSS Homepages
About a week ago I heard the news that GeoCities is finally shutting down, something that I had wrongly thought had been done some time ago. So, with many other geeks I’ve been bring back memories of regular visits to my friends personal websites full of animated gifs and links to other ‘cool’ stuff on the web. These memories have got me thinking about the future, should we still all have a personal homepage in a multi-social-network age? And if so why are we not using it? And what should it be?
So we, the internet generation, might have started out with GeoCities homepages, but we moved on to blogging and are now part of a multi-network community. Whilst being part of a community we have actively given all of our content away to other keymasters, such as Google, Twitter, Yahoo and especially Facebook. Facebook is an intersting point though, it is a personal homepage, but it remains behind a firewall allowing only friends to access private data. Then I got to thinking, just about everything else has an RSS feed and I would like to have a summary all in one place, yet something that is mine.
Right now I’ve started to put together a single homepage (link to my homepage – www.oliverlorton.co.uk) which brings in a selection of my RSS feeds into one place. It is nothing more than an online business card with an RSS reader built in, but I like it. I’m using PHP and MagpieRSS to make it all work and I hope to release it as an open source project soon. Anyone interested in helping me to get this off the ground should get in touch, you can do so here.
Update 24/07/2009: I have since started another more worthwhile project which demands more of my time. I would still be interested to hear from anyone who is interested in using this software though, so please get in touch.
Choosing Font Stacks
Recently other website designers have been discussing two separate aspects of website design; graded browser support and font stacks. I think that we need to start thinking about both of these at the same time.
It seems to me that print designers have all the fun. They can have any choice of type for their projects and as such their choice of type actually defines their work, an obvious example is David Carson. On the other hand, website designers are usually limited to the fonts installed on the users computers. These fonts are dependent on many different aspects of each users set up, which operating system and which browser they use, even their version of office suite can affect this. So traditionally designers have limited themselves to a very small selection of fonts that almost all users are guaranteed to have installed. Recent chatter has encouraged designers to push the boundaries of the most common fonts by providing stacks with enhanced fonts for more up-to-date users. A great example of this is demonstrated by Nathan Ford of Unit Interactive.
However, I want to reverse this thinking a bit with respect to graded support. I think that we should be encouraging yet a more advanced thinking in our clients, if possible. Assuming that we can convince them to choose graded browser support then maybe we can get them to choose graded OS support too (with respect to type).
Graded browser support is an effort to move designers away from having to support IE6 as the most important browser in the world, thus allowing some of the newer CSS features included in more modern browsers – whilst still making sure that users of IE6 are presented with usable decent looking websites. So with respect to type, we should be looking at the latest fonts to be included in Windows & Macs and making these our preferential design choices, with suitable alternatives for older operating system setups.
The key thing ask your client is: “How long do you want your website to look good for?” Designing a website now, with type that looks good on the most popular OS and browser will probably mean that the design needs updating in twelve months time when it begins to look tired and the selected browser/OS combination becomes less popular. Online technology may move at a fast pace, but browser and OS popularity doesn’t. Yet we know what the future will look like because it is available now. Designing for now, means that rather than your website getting gradually older it gets progressively newer as more and more users upgrade their systems.