Element Fusion

I came across an article yesterday that really got me thinking about minimalism.  The article is "Minimalist Website Design Patterns" from Max Kiesler.  He gives an overview of minimalist concepts as they apply to website design and then dissects a few website examples, evaluating them so that you can see what makes them minimalist and how, or if, they work.

So, after reading the article, here's what I've been thinking.  I like the idea of minimalism.  I've always been fond of it across most all art forms, especially music, which is where I did most of my study and training.  Simplicity appeals to me.  I like to boil things down to their most basic concepts and I think that if one can accomplish something with just the basics, why add to it?  Seems very logical, right?

Then why is it so rare to see pure minimalism implemented well?  I mean, if minimalism is a great design standard, then why don't more people design that way?  If minimalism is a great musical standard, then why do so few composers employ it?

I think it's because minimalism is an extreme, and with most things, the "extreme" rarely represents the ideal.  Often there is a movement that pushes toward the extreme until it is reached, only to find out that the extreme, by itself, is a bit empty.  The beauty of art is found in the tension between opposing extremes.

Let's consider jazz, which in the early 1900s was undergoing a revolution, pushing more and more away from structure and toward the extreme of freedom.  In the 1950s, this turned into a movement, where advocates of free jazz felt that any semblance of musical structure was wrong.  This movement eventually culminated in Ornette Coleman's "Free Jazz," a recording that consisted of musicians improvising for forty minutes straight with no underlying structure at all.  "Free Jazz" represented an extreme, and no other recording since then has attempted to accomplish the same thing.  Rather, jazz has generally moved back to find a balance in the spectrum between freedom and structure.  In fact, the beauty of jazz is found in that very struggle.

In much the same way, I think that some designers attempt to make minimalism in website design an end goal, when it should be considered just one end of the spectrum.  Certainly minimalism teaches us a great deal, but the beauty of what we design is found in the struggle between minimalism and over-stimulation.  I think it is the ability of an artist to balance these two extremes that makes them who they are.