Minimalist Beauty

I just spent some time updating a few things on this blog. One of those things is I made a new header for myself. I decided I wanted to make an effort in capitalizing on the whole “about nothing” name. The first thing I needed was an image that reflected solitude or a sense of isolation. Strangely enough a google image search quickly turned up this image.

A little tweaking with paint.net and I had the banner that I was after. At least as far as not having to pay for one. By no means am I a designer. And that’s really what I wanted to talk about in this post, design. Oh, you thought I wrote a post just to point out my new banner? No, but it did afford me the opportunity to write this post.

I’m quite fond of minimalism when it comes to websites. One of the most “beautiful” websites on the internet is the Google home page. They’ve made an art out of lacking nothing while having no content on the home page. No content except what is absolutely necessary. But then I look at my own blog, and almost every other blog and I see the exact opposite. Tons of stuff crammed into our little corner of the world wide web and most of it entirely irrelevant to the purpose of our blogs. Worse yet I find it makes it very easy to be overwhelmed by the “fluff” and entirely forget the purpose of this blog.

What is the purpose of this blog?

Have some fun,learn a few things about internet money making opportunities, share some knowledge, and build a community. That’s it. In a nutshell the purpose for this blog. By looking at it I bet you couldn’t tell, huh?

Needless to say you my dear readers are going to have to suffer through another theme redesign in the near future. I’ll give you a little hint as to what I have in mind. If you have any thoughts about it by all means say whatever is on your mind.

• More “white space”
• Less crowding on the sidebar
• Go with a spartan white layout all around
• Rely on borders to break up sidebar from main content area, not background colors
• Widen the content area by another 25px (currently 575px) and as a result slim down the sidebar
• and a few other ideas I have floating around

Why minimalism?

The human mind is naturally attracted to simplicity UNLESS there is something as visually domineering as a trainwreck to draw our attention. Think Myspace when you think about a trainwreck. It has so much going on it has to be interesting. But take away 30% of the fluff and it would die off very quickly. One the other hand (going back to Google) Google is a perfect example of how a minimalistic design can have a huge impact on your traffic. Consider these points -

• A minimal design is not overwhelming
• A minimal design lets the eyes naturally wander instead of forcing the reader to concentrate
• A minimal design is much easier to maintain
• A minimal design lends itself to future expansion and changes

That’s just a small group of reasons why every blog out there should consider minimalist designs.

Are you a minimalist blogger or web designer? If not why not?

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Tags: blog design, blog themes, design, web design