How to Achieve a Minimalistic Website
Minimalism in web design has recently become quite popular and doesn’t seem to be really going anywhere. Some of the main reasons why it has become so popular consist of its ability to enhance the user experience, its ability to help users easily focus on specific desired page content, and its clean, crisp look just to name a few. I personally am a huge fan of it as I will admit I can have a short attention span at times and really appreciate a clean-looking website that helps me quickly achieve my goal. Below are some tips that I constantly employ when I’m creating a website with a minimalist design.
Giving Whitespace a lot of Love
Whitespace is so important to minimalistic website design. It not only makes the style of the site feel clean and airy but also gives the users eyes visual rest. This can be huge for improving the users’ visual experience with the website along with helping get the website’s messaging across. If you haven’t seen the famous lingscars.com website yet, I’m showing you it now. Let me start off by saying it is an awesome website. I love the damn thought and creativity that Ling put into it. Easily of my favorite websites of all time. With this said, from the perspective of using a lot of whitespace, this is not the best way to go about it. Obviously, this is an extreme example but it still pushes the point home as to how an overly-cluttered website can make it hard for someone to know what they should be focusing on.
Now compare this to Meta’s Website. They do a great job at making use of spacing to help the user focus on one section of the page at a time. Very clean and easy to read.
Squeaky Clean Typography
Making sure your typography is clean, spacious, and easy to read is very important to creating a minimalist style. Of the different font types, sans-serif is usually the easiest to read. This does not mean that you can’t use a serif font though. The main goal here is to choose a font that is clean and legible while sticking to the brand feeling of the website. Another tip to help create clean typography could be to add spacing in the text lines by increasing line heights. This is most important to keep in mind for paragraph text as usually, you will have multiple lines of paragraph text stacked that the user will need to be able to read. See the example below.
Utilizing Grid Layouts to Create a Symmetrical Layout
Making your website symmetrical can also give it a nice, beautiful minimalistic aesthetic. Symmetric layouts allow the eyes to almost visually predict what they are going to see further in the layout as they move down the page.
Lightly Sprinkle in Graphics & Animations
Everybody loves graphics and animations. Let’s admit it they are great! They make websites look nice and give them a beautiful touch. The key to using them in minimalistic-styled web designs is to follow a less is more mentality. Focusing on utilizing animations and images that are high quality in a sparing manner can help make your website look stunning. This also goes along with the overall goal of a minimalistic design to keep things simple and prevent clutter.
Hopefully, this was helpful in setting you on your way to creating beautiful minimalist websites. Feel free to check out our other blog posts for other web design tips and our website templates if you are looking to get a jumpstart on a client project.
