Minimalism in website design

There is a saying among long distance backpackers, "If you don't have it, you don't need it." The idea is that you can cut far more from your kit than you thought possible, and your being around to miss something implies anthropically that it wasn't as essential as you thought. Health and mileage are what matters, and the stuff on your back becomes a separate equation, a tradeoff between discomfort while carrying for comfort in camp. You quickly shed the non-essentials, then the essentials, then the dire until your pack, now well under 15 pounds in warm weather, ceases to be noticed at all. At this point you find yourself weighing, debating, and finally allowing in the smallest luxuries... a rain jacket, a small paperback, an ipod. Just enough to soften the roughest edges of the experience without interfering with what matters - health and mileage.

My favorite site designs take the same approach. A few months ago the Economist did a story about Twitter's Evan Williams I related to.

"... Mr Williams... tries mental tricks. One is to ask “what can we take away to create something new?” A decade ago, you could have started with Yahoo! and taken away all the clutter around the search box to get Google. When he took Blogger and took away everything except one 140-character line, he had Twitter. Radical constraints, he believes, can lead to breakthroughs in simplicity and entirely new things. "

Twitter my be a little baroque for my taste, but the philosophy is there. Some other newer sites that embody this spirit are Muxtape and Twistori.

Hillel from Jackson Fish Market talks about "artisanal software" with a gourmet foods metaphor, and it's an excellent analogy for startups and the way our sites work best when small in scope and carefully crafted. We need to be careful not to fall into the other trap of artisanal foods - making our hobby our business - but solving small problems extremely well is what we do best.

So to make a beautiful website: start with a scope that covers only the essential solution of a problem that needs solving for your primary use case "story". Cut all features that aren't absolutely necessary. 90% of the "good ideas" is about right. You'll save yourself effort if you can identify them ahead of time... I am notoriously bad about coding things before I realize they are non-essential. Then come up with 15-20 different visual designs that add as little as possible to the greatest effect. Think of every .png as a rock in your backpack.

This philosophy can be applied to almost everything you do or create, and it has never let me down. The less clutter you bring into your life and your work, the more effective you can be at the things you do and the more time you can spend doing what you love.