Essential Tips for Great Minimalist Web Design — Monday Masterclass

this week we’ll be reviewing the
essential characteristics that make a
design truly minimalistic and some cool
practical tricks for building minimalist
sites with elemental minimalist designs
for websites aren’t just fashionable
they are practical they are fast loading
they are very clear and very easy to
navigate potentially making them great
for user experience now it’s important
to understand what minimalism or
minimalist design is creating a site in
a monochromatic color scheme or building
a page with lots of negative space
doesn’t necessarily mean that our end
result is a minimalist design we’ve
covered the ideals of minimalism in the
in-depth article that was published with
this video and you can find links to
that and more in the show notes below
but for now let’s try to understand what
minimalism design means renascence
artist Michelangelo is said to have
explained that the way he created
sculptures was to clear away every
little piece of the marble block to
expose the statue hidden deep within now
in a nutshell minimalism takes this idea
several levels further and presents
designs that have been stripped down to
its most basic essentials to reveal its
content perfectly distilled and clear to
the viewer now minimalism can be found
in every form of Art and Design in
architecture literature even in music it
continuously pushes the limit trying to
find the absolute minimum content that
we need to convey a clear concise
message while disregarding anything that
could possibly detract or distract from
it now to achieve this in web design web
creators prefer to use fine delicate
lines short astute text hidden content
accessible by clicking on abstract icons
subtle nuances and motifs that are
barely noticeable now of course as web
creators we also need to find a way to
balance that is
I’m plan with the content that our
client wants us to showcase something
that is true regardless of the type of
style that we’re using but obviously
more so if that style is minimalism now
throughout this masterclass we like to
use this website as an example of a
practical minimalist design it’s a site
that has appeared in one of our
showcases and it was designed for the
Swedish web studio web Nord and as you
can see it lives up to that wonderfully
good old Scandinavian reputation for
minimalism the following is a list of
common characteristics that are a direct
result of putting minimalist ideology
into practical design the first thing
that we notice once we’ve stripped a
site bare is the vast empty space that
surrounds a graphic element or what
professionals call negative space
so-called because it is the opposite of
the space taken up by real objects now
as we can see in our example site having
so much of it creates a confident
relaxing feeling like a quiet breath of
fresh air in minimalist design the main
purpose of negative space is to keep the
viewer focused on a specific point but
being void of distractions a page full
of negative space goes even further and
drives users to an important element or
feature on that page
now as web creators it also focuses us
to be more precise with a few details
that do remain in the space and as we’ve
pointed out many times in our master
classes it’s within the limitations that
our creativity truly thrives now
elementals grid system of vertical
sections and horizontal columns makes
establishing this negative space for our
page designs very simple and efficient
and the best way to do this is in the
editor panel and under the Advanced tab
use the margin and padding settings to
create all the space we need around our
elements and this is also where we can
make the adjustments we need to assure
that our design looks just as good in
responsive mode
personally and I could be wrong but I
think that this site follows a mobile
first design which would explain why the
images are relatively large in desktop
view true minimalist see negative space
as equally important to design as the
content the images the graphic elements
and the text now when it comes to
written content we’ll want to rely on as
little as possible keeping it to a
slogan or too lean but clever copy with
text being one of the very few elements
left to dominate our negative space it
becomes far more valuable as a graphic
element notice that minimalist designers
explore and expand on the shapes and
lines of the fonts styling the letters
themselves to convey the visual
narrative or main idea of the site we’ve
seen many wonderful examples of this in
the sites that our community members
have created and designed examples where
they have taken advantage of the
typography and custom font options that
we have examined and discussed in detail
in previous master classes and again
there’ll be a link to that and more in
the show notes below now some minimalist
designers prefer to go even further and
create and upload their textual assets
as actual images which brings us to our
next essential characteristic of this
style of design – what many refer to as
vivid imagery images are not a
prerequisite of minimalist web design
but then again these days we have a hard
time finding a site with no images at
all but when these sites do include
images they are so few and sparse that
each one is meticulously selected when
hand picking the right image for our
site we want to consider every property
of the image and ask ourselves does it
convey the main idea or emotion of our
site does it convey it clearly as for
the style of the image itself
well many believe that flat images or
images without three-dimensional shading
and lighting are a standard of
minimalist design but I’m sure that just
as much as I have you’ve also come
across some great examples of minimal
website design with skeuomorphic
graphics that create the illusion of
realistic three-dimensional objects now
once we found the perfect image we can
upload it and stylize it using elemental
CSS filters and blending options in the
image widgets style tab whether or not
our hand-picked images are the most
important elements of our pages design
maintaining a simple and very clear
visual hierarchy is another essential
characteristic of minimalist design both
the vast negative space and the few
elements that it envelopes already give
us a head start many designers prefer to
adopt the Neilson groups F shape pattern
as it is a pattern that uses tend to
follow beginning in the top left hand
corner of the screen then scanning to
the right returning back to the left
before moving a step down and repeating
the left-to-right scanning movement and
so on it allows us to give every one of
our rarified elements a chance to shine
in the spotlight in accordance with its
importance now obviously this type of
design pattern is not recommended for
content-heavy sites but then again if
our site were content heavy it wouldn’t
be considered minimalist now as you know
I personally prefer to work with the
Navigator feature open whenever I create
sites in Elementor and I find that it is
especially convenient when I am setting
up or reorganizing the order of the
sections and elements to further perfect
the visual hierarchy of the design
another reason for using the navigator
in Elementor is to assure symmetry
another essential characteristic of
minimalist design symmetry promotes
visual balance and order making the
visual hierarchy clearer it also helps
us to create a single focal point where
we can place our main message or image
but most importantly symmetry helps to
ensure a better user experience and
there are several types of symmetry that
we can rely on linear symmetry symmetry
created along a vertical horizontal or
even diagonal line radial symmetry
symmetry that radiates from the center
outwards in multiple there
actions approximate symmetry when we
create a sense of balance by relying on
similar sizes or distances within this
space but without the objects appearing
to be mirrored and of course asymmetry
or lack of symmetry again all of this
can be simply and accurately built along
the grid when working in elemental even
when we’re creating a symmetry or what
some refer to as broken grid design
we’ll still need to use the grid to get
our graphics and text elements aligned
according to our design plan by the way
a great Pro trick to saving time and
making sure that we’re creating the
symmetry that we are after is by
duplicating sections columns widgets etc
or by using the copy/paste style option
in the option menu to allocate the same
exact attributes to another element
without affecting the widgets content
there’s a great misconception that
monochrome is the most essential
characteristic of minimalist design and
this is why we’ll find people
mistakingly labeling a site’s designers
minimalist just because it’s all in
black and white so let’s just burst that
bubble and say that color is a
characteristic of minimalist design and
that while a monochromatic design could
be considered minimalistic a minimalist
design does not have to be monochromatic
now we could be using an image that
could include many colors so long as
they work together in a way that
conforms to a minimalist ideal
traditionally minimalist designs rely on
a modest set of colors usually two or
three commonly these colors form a
subtle scheme with delicate contrasts
among the colors of the few elements and
a much less subtle contrast with the
background color sometimes designers
employ color fields vast shapes of a
single color to help create these
contrasts establishing and directing the
user to the main areas of the page a
fashionable way to achieve this is by
relying on less vivid subdued colors
much like pastel colors cars with a
relatively high luminosity and low
saturation now as professional web
creators will be figuring out our color
palette in the pre-planning stage before
we even sit down to create our site with
elemental however as professional
elemental users we know that there’s a
great deal of pre-planning that we can
do in element or especially when it
comes to selecting default colors and
setting up our color palette let’s just
go to the element or editor panel and
click on the menu icon and in the
options we’ll click on the default
colors let’s select the pastel preset
just because we mentioned it earlier and
now let’s say the client wants us to use
a color scheme with more blue so we’ll
click on one of the new default colors
and in the color picker
we’ll use the hue slider to select
another complimenting or contrasting
color with similar luminosity and
saturation now when we click on the plus
symbol will not only be adding it to the
default colors
but we’ll be adding it as a preset so
that every time we need this color it’ll
be right there in the color Pickers
favorites making our workflow so much
easier
the last essential characteristic on our
list probably serves as a good guideline
as to when we should turn to minimalism
for our designs and that is modernism
and I’ve met designers who claim that
this is a bit like asking what came
first the chicken or the egg minimalism
appeared in design around the same time
during the last century that as a
society we were getting very excited
about new modern technology TVs and
time-saving household gadgets so you
could say that minimalism has its roots
in the streamlined almost surgically
clean designs of the modern era that
peaked in the 1950s and 60s and it’s
precisely because minimalism became so
synonymous with advanced reliable
technology that years later industries
revived this design trend to promote
high tech advanced environmental
technology and modern office spaces and
so on and this is probably why we rarely
if at all see minimalism in designs for
businesses and products that have
tradition as its central concept such as
designs for a traditional family-run
pizza restaurant for example this week
we reviewed minimalism what the concept
means as an artistic ideal and how it
manifests in web design and if you’re
looking for inspiration and further
material on minimalist design we highly
recommend checking out the links below
and of course in the in-depth article
that we released with this video and if
you would like to share minimalist
designs and artists that have inspired
you perhaps a minimalist design of your
own then by all means please share this
in the comments below along with any
tips and advice that could help other
users and if you have any criticisms we
are equally interested in your thoughts
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