Your website design is the face you show your clients and customers. It can be easy to get starry-eyed at fancy website features to try and lure people in, but this can end up burying your message and having an adverse effect. Sometimes, a minimalist web design is the way to go.
At Squarebird, we’re the leading Bristol web design agency. From cutting-edge graphic design to a stripped-back, spacious look, we know the best times to apply different design philosophies to your website. In this article, we’ll discuss what minimalist web design is, when it should and shouldn’t be used, and how to achieve it.
“Minimalism is about the distillation of the brand story you are communicating with your audience. It’s a focusing of your content in both how it’s crafted and how it’s displayed in order to communicate clearly and concisely. Less is more when you take the time to craft your brand story.” – Dan Collings, Head of Design
What is minimalist web design?
The clue is in the name – minimalist web design aims to minimise the number of distracting features and colours on your website. This strips out unnecessary roadblocks in the way of your digital storytelling experience, distilling your messaging so it is bitesize and digestible. This story extends across multiple channels or ‘touchpoints’, such as ads, social media, and your website design itself.
From a design point of view, decisions will be made to reduce distraction and the complexity of information. Visual design is geared to convey emotion, inspire viewers, and facilitate action. Minimalist design reduces this ability to convey a spread of emotions, but accentuates certain forms of emotion.
A key example is Apple, whose thoughtful engineering, and carefully planned design gives them their premium feel. However, minimalism also restricts you from making strong emotional connections, so it’s not always the best for your web design.
As well as the design, minimalism also includes telling a shorter, more concise, and more detailed story with your content – communicating key messages in less time.
Why is minimalist web design important?
Here are some of the main applications of minimalist web design:
- Accentuating specific emotions and distilling down information
- Focusing people on a singular journey
- Removing distractions, creating a flow, and giving people room to process the story
- Sophisticated and mature approach to communication
To see minimalism in action, a good place to look at is your campaign landing pages. A campaign landing page will likely strip out navigation to other pages, providing one journey and one call to action at the end. This focused method of design leads interested users to a single, planned outcome.
However, minimalist web design isn’t always useful. If you’re trying to communicate many different stories or services with a lot of information packed into each, you’ll need longer-form content and more design features to accommodate it.
It’s important to note that there’s not one cut and dry answer for a given industry. You can look at charities, where an organisation like Oxfam will have soft green colours and a playful typeface, using their design to spark emotion in their visitors. Meanwhile, a group like the British Red Cross have a far more minimalist, even serious, look and feel – reflecting their specific, serious purpose, with a brand strategy that communicates with their audiences using visual elements to two different stories.
How do you achieve a minimalist web design?
Achieving a minimalist web design requires a strong understanding of your brand, audience, and underlying business objectives. Here are three key steps to take to achieve this form of design.
- Review your brand strategy. Before going down the route of a minimalist web design, consider whether your business objectives lead towards communicating certain values, ways of working, products, and services, and whether or not this relies on emotion. These factors will help you make the initial decision of launching a minimalist web design.
- Distil your story. Once you’ve settled on a minimalist web design, the next step is to work out how to tell your story. This involves condensing information down into what matters most. Despite there being less content, it becomes even more important, now needing to convey emotion and messaging as succinctly as possible.
- Improve your content design. Telling a story, thinking about the flow of your content, and creating an understandable journey with no distractions are all the role of your content design. Make sure you consider each step your visitors will take when designing and writing your website.
Minimalist web design can also be split further into two categories:
Minimalist brand identity
A minimalist brand will have been designed to purposefully represent the values and reasoning behind a company’s existence. Apple, Dyson, and Uber are all great examples of brands that display little to no information from the brand itself, but still convey a sense of planned engineering, technology, and a premium nature.
Minimalist UI design
This is what you’d more traditionally consider when you think about minimalist web design. Minimalist UIs typically use a single colour background, with distilled text, lots of white space, and rounded corners for UI elements and images to make things softer and easier to process.
A good example for minimalist UI design is McDonalds – a bright, powerful consumer visual identity, displayed on a site that uses minimalist UI design principles to enhance their brand and messaging.
What is a web design actually trying to achieve?
If you’re still stuck on whether or not to go for a minimalist website design, it’s good to look at what a website design is there to achieve.
Website design needs to consistently convey, visually and through content, the values, messaging, story, and action that your brand wants to achieve on your platform.
A website is a major touchpoint for clients and customers. It’s your own custom space where you can communicate as many stories as you like, with as much information as you like.
This can wind up being overwhelming for your visitors, causing decision paralysis and obfuscating core details. Minimalist web design strips things back to the fundamentals, playing a strategic role in communicating with your audience and providing a mature journey.
Evolve your web design with Squarebird
A minimalist web design should only be pursued if your goal is to cut back on content and visuals to focus on a specific, honed message. This relies on having a mature brand, distilled information, and a brand strategy that backs up every step you take.
At Squarebird, we’re Bristol’s leading web design and digital agency. From your website design to your brand, to the strategy behind it all, we can help you make informed decisions and engineer user-focused web designs that take you to the next level of your business’ growth. Find out more by getting in touch!