Hilton Kramer, an art critic for the The New York Times in the late 1960s once said, “The more minimal the art, the more maximum the explanation” and that quote rings true to the fundamentals of design itself. The more modern we get with our web design approach, the more minimal we want things to become. The more we want our small expressions to be conceived as larger explanations. In short, a clear and concise message throughout web design is ultimately the foreseeable interpretation to what we call “modern” design.
A brief history of web design thought -
If you remember anything about the Internet in the late 1990’s, you will remember personal web pages. The various culprits of this period were Tripod, Angelfire, AOL, and Yahoo. When personal web pages hit the scales of popularity, web design changed for good. Before that, we were used to getting our web sites delivered in white on black page schemes with as little graphical elements as needed.
But after this explosion of personal web pages, Internet users were bombarded with animated gifs, flashy text, and color schemes that would make even the most artistic of users cry out for a “less is more” approach. We became inundated with web design that turned everything “up to eleven,” and for that I guess we owe a little gratitude.
The creative spark of all those personal web page creators, while a bit misguided in terms of delivering a clear message, showed that we Internet users crave a little creativity in what we find on the web. What happened then as a larger movement during the late 1990’s? Businesses gave away to old HTML, to the white and black backgrounds, revamped content and design with streamlined graphical elements and added content that was reflective of an overarching company message—for example, AOL’s revamped message was “AOL Anytime, Anywhere.”
Gone were the days of simple links, text and pages. Now websites were integrating complex frameworks of html, or java menu systems combined with text, and additional graphical elements included in logos, headers, and footers. If you are interested in examples of this change, check out archive.org, search for Microsoft’s website, and look for the changes over time. In addition, look at how AOL redesigned their website in the 2000’s; how those changes are reflective of this larger movement towards a graphical, more concise, and modern approach to web design.
Modern Web Design -
Coming from this movement in the early 2000’s we have once again faced a revamp of the fundamentals of web design. Now with the inclusion of social media, and the draw of industry-related hot topics like embeddable type, web 3.0, xhtml and a slew of other catchy phrases, we are meeting up with our “modern” version of web design more frequently—we find many examples nowadays of what this is.
What many business, personal and blog sites are doing is emphasizing the need for a high-quality message, superior content, and using web design to fit those goals. With the introduction of newer HTML technologies, doors are opened to the designer’s creative powers much more. Designers are becoming less limited in what they can do, graphically or otherwise for a websites design.
We are not only bringing a larger approach and message to the websites of the 2010’s, but we are analyzing and improving everything else. From one-page layouts, typography, artistically merited logos, hand-drawn designs, typefaces, interactive approaches and to intuitive design advances, the model for web design has changed significantly since the inception.
The Minimalistic –
Throwing “old school” methods out the window, many websites feature an emphasizing design message that centers on what the artist would call “negative space,” or the empty space that surrounds a design. Textual elements, conceptual design choices, and an approach of simplicity will highlight this approach and reign supreme in terms of what is featured on so-called “modern” designed websites; for examples of these minimalistic designs check out typographica.org, pixelcraft.ie, or uxmag.com.
In essence, designers are cultivating, and shaping web site design with many more tools than they had in previous times. In the 2010’s and beyond, we are entering a time when web site design is becoming centralized on the “artistic implication,” combined with the visually stunning elements of the design itself—
In essence, the emphasizing of a “less is more” approach mixed with the advent of new technology, which creates all new spheres of web design methods and approaches.
And for what we have done here at Cirrus ABS, check out our portfolio section for a sample of our design approaches and practices that emphasize a modern style of web design.
