I must have a different meaning for the word minimal. I get what this gallery is going for and kudos to the site and lots of the designs, but it ain't showcasing "minimal" in my book. :)
The HN headline has been changed from the website's title. The website is called minimal.design but has nothing to do with minimal websites. As far as I can tell, it's more about certain minimalist visual design principles.
From the about page: [1]
> Minimal Gallery was accidentally brought to life when I started collecting websites as inspiration for client projects, screenshotting and categorizing them for better organization. And never stopped.
I don't think it even fits that description. Most of the examples feature copious amounts of highly unnecessary animations. If you take a snapshot it looks kinda minimalist, but if you see it in motion it doesn't really feel like that.
All of the websites in the top-row require JS, so I stopped looking at that point. To me, requiring JS is not minimalist, and those random sites aren't important enough for me to enable JS on them.
Hey, creator of Minimal Gallery here. Thanks to everyone who's visiting.
The word "minimal" doesn't have a lot to do with minimalism in this case. When starting out 10 years ago this was correct, but nowadays I'm just focussing on websites that don't do scroll-hijacking, don't involve a bunch of crazy 3d-animations or in general aren't simply usable. So the only real requirements are "functional" and "usable".
Sorry for the confusion - feel free to reach out with feedback. For example I only recently added the jobs section because it was requested many times. If you have any other ideas, don't hesitate to reach out.
I found examples in the Minimal Design gallery that I would not choose to call minimal but I don't want to make an argument about form over function. Needless to say I like being able to easily navigate and locate what a website wants to communicate and having to scroll a lot I feel defeats that (I'm also cruisin' on an old Celeron at the moment).
Regardless this gallery doesn't appear to be going for minimal in function but minimal in form and for that I say it is a nice collection and there is some cool art and presentations here.
Loads of these websites are valid businesses and the “minimal” visual aesthetic serves their purpose.
Yet loads of comments here criticise them because they are not “minimal” in use of resource (defaults), “minimal” in use of information presentation, or “minimal” in structure, as if these are the only true minimal.
All these websites would fail their business intent if they stripped back to these ideals (a branding agency with no css: c’mon), and this gallery would fail, and this gallery wouldn’t have generated the interest to make the front page of hacker news.
I for one appreciate this type of content in the hacker news mix. But the comments can often be blinked engineering drivel.
I hardly think that people complain about css styling, it's more about 4MB of js taking 20 seconds to render a news story, less usable than plain html+css.
Again, this is not a post on a gallery of websites that don’t have 4mb of JavaScript.
Is the fact that they do have 4mb an interesting or novel discussion point.
As in, I remember once was going to invite this branding agency to pitch for the job because their website demonstrated creative immersion, craft and sensibility but then I noticed it has 4mb of JavaScript so I didn’t.
I’m sure these websites could be optimised greatly. But time, budgets and scope don’t include it because the business need isn’t there.
Maybe a more interesting talking point, from an engineering perspective, would be why there is no product value in that.
They are infamous for being old fashioned, note how they are still fundamentally Web 1.0 sites with columns and packed densely with content which is mostly text.
I love how I can just open a Japanese website up and have everything worth seeing right there in front of me. No need to scroll past a 1000 pixel tall, unrelated stock picture to then deal with "content" spaced 100 pixels apart and using only 600 pixels of my 1920 pixels wide screen and "dynamically loading in" as I scroll past them.
I love how I can just open a Japanese website up and generally have it load in seconds if not instantly. No need to wait tens of seconds or even minutes for a trillion lines of JavaShit to load and be processed and then wait on a trillion more assets to be loaded and processed.
Fuck minimalism, I want usability. Websites are carriers of information, not high school art projects.
How do they work on mobile viewports? I get what you are saying, I think many here prefer websites like HN that are simple, dense and fast but many old-fashioned sites are dense, but aren't really usable on mobile and not always fast.
No first hand experience, but I would hazard a bet they work well. Mobile device use is up up up and desktops/laptops down down down in Japan just like the rest of the world, and yet the Japanese internet largely remains the same.
Hmm it depends what you call usable. Typically these web 1.0 geocities type site were not usable at all. I'm talking markees, spinning gifs all over the page, animated stars background, snowflakes over the content and questionable content organisation! I lived it, and I miss them for the nostalgia.
Here is a very usable site, although the design of it is a bit lacking imho
I have 1080 pixels of vertical screen real estate, why do I have to scroll down before I can see any worthwhile information? Why is so much space wasted on unrelated (WTF does LEGO and Macbooks have to do with W3C?), stock pictures? Why is the W3C logo both comically small and comically large and in the way? Why are news postings at the very bottom? Where the hell even is the search box? Why is everything a dropdown?
Contrast the current website[1]:
I don't have to scroll before I can see worthwhile information (the page is actually vertically shorter than the beta's). No space is wasted on unrelated, stock pictures. The W3C logo is appropriately sized and located both prominently and out of the way. News postings are front and center like they should be. The search box is clearly defined by borders and shading. All site navigation is immediately accessible with just one click.
does this site even have anything to do with minimal design other than the name of the site being 'minimal gallery' ? the top of the page says 'Curating beautiful & functional websites' (unrelated to minimalism) and the about page doesn't mention anything about minimalism or 'minimal design'
If a word is "often misused" it usually indicates it has more than one common or accepted meaning, or is just hard to define. It's not like everyone but you is wrong about what they mean by minimalism, but that they don't mean by it what you mean by it.
Here's one of my favorite minimal sites. It lets you consume a content, buy stuff, and join a mailing list, which are the only 3 things websites do anyways.
This is a surprisingly interesting metric (usability vs. weight). My homepage sits at 4.3kb but looks more traditional and usable compared to many listed. Constraint is fun.
