maximalism

While everyone has their own opinions about design trends, I think one of the big arguments is minimalism vs maximalism. Are you team “less is more” or “less is a bore?” Personally speaking, I am a big advocate for maximalism! One of the biggest factors towards the push of maximalist designs comes from Gen Z. Whether it relates to fashion, interior design, or now even web design, Gen Z has opted for maximalism as a way to show personality and freedom of expression. Especially in relation to interior design, maximalist home decor grew in popularity during the pandemic to create a more colorful and stimulating environment since people were locked up in their homes all day every day. While maximalism is all about how “more is more,” it’s important to use balance when curating web designs. The following websites are examples of maximalist websites done well.

Curry Cafe

Curry Cafe is a one-page website for a restaurant in Melbourne. The website features a lot of vibrant colors, moving parts, and fun graphics. While it may seem like a lot at first glance (because it is) this design works because of consistent design elements, like the color palette. The website mainly focuses on the use of yellow and orange with green as an accent color. These bright colors work for the design because they are consistent throughout the website and since they chose such vibrant colors, they limited the use of other colors on the site so it wouldn’t be overwhelming. The website is a good example of strategic and deliberate use of color, which lends to their brand identity. Being a curry restaurant, their website talks a lot about spice. The warm yellow and orange colors are perfect for representing the warmth of spice that their brand is all about. Their maximalist website clearly shows users what their brand is all about while creating an engaging experience for anyone who visits the page.

Alex pierce

As I’ve been saying, one of the great things about maximalism is how it can show personality and a sense of identity, so what better place to use maximalism than for a portfolio website! Alex Pierce is a self-proclaimed geek, visual designer, and creative director. With just one look at his website, all of that information becomes abundantly clear without even having to read anything. The whole site is obviously themed after a retro-gaming aesthetic, and I highly recommend checking it out! The theming of this website is incredibly well done and features lots of interactive elements and nostalgic influences. The reason that this maximalist design works so well for his portfolio is because it does an exceptional job at representing who he is as a person through compelling design choices. Each and every element of this website was curated to contribute to the overall narrative of branding himself as a geek designer. The pixelated font, retro graphics, and vibrant colors are all part of what makes this such a good maximalist design.

behave

do you still think less is more?

What all of these examples have in common is that their use of maximalist design helps to show users their brand identity. Maximalism isn’t just about throwing a bunch of things together to make a loud design, it’s about curating big and bold elements that show a freedom of expression and identity, whether that be for a brand or a personal portfolio. While maximalist design may not be for everyone, the use of creative storytelling through these maximalist design elements helps to target specific audiences that would be drawn to a chosen aesthetic. I think that minimalism will always be a classic design choice, but the current trend of maximalism draws in audiences with it’s clear sense of identity and expression.

For my blog post, I decided to write about the website Stop. Upon clicking on the site, I was immediately drawn to the red color. The website only uses two colors throughout, that being red and an off-white color. This gives it a very minimal and bold look. After all, for a website titled “Stop” there’s no better color than that of a stop sign. The entirety of the site is very minimal and straight to the point, which is fitting considering it’s a website about eliminating spam. The design also utilizes a classic serif font. This style font is classic, timeless, formal, and straightforward. It plays perfectly into their minimal theme, as the site is very straight to the point and strays from anything too flashy or distracting.

I came across a personal pet peeve when visiting the site on my phone. Upon scrolling further down the page, we’re greeted with this huge blob of text. Nothing annoys me quite like never ending paragraphs. I instinctively kept scrolling past it because my immediate reaction was “that’s way too much to read.” After going back and reading it though, I think this problem could be easily fixed by breaking the paragraph into smaller chunks, such as how I annotated it above. On a desktop, the blob of text fits much better and isn’t nearly as jarring, but when I saw it on my phone it was so overwhelming that I immediately skipped over it (which I don’t think the designers intended for).

This section of the site was definitely my favorite, and for good reasons. I am obsessed with how they show the chain of emails at a tilted perspective, fading into the background as if they were never ending.  The red in the background reminds me of a headache for some reason. I think that visual and my association with it works perfectly as a design concept though, because spam emails are quite the headache. I think that the middle section that I circled in this screenshot is so well done, because it is so simple, yet it invokes feeling. They perfectly incapsulated the feeling of receiving a bunch of spam emails with that graphic. However, I don’t quite understand why they chose to use those squiggly lines. My assumption is that they were intended for separating the page content, but I really don’t think they’re necessary at all.

Moving further down the page, this section is all about how they actually stop the spam emails. On the flipside of the last section I discussed, this part might be my least favorite. My issue is that there’s a lot of floating elements. I think this is kind of distracting, and my eyes don’t really know where to look so I just glance around through the icons. I think it would have been more efficient if they had made little card for each talking point, rather than having them just floating against the white background.

As seen above, the designers used a dotted line to box in the content of this section. I think that they should’ve done something similar to this in the last section I mentioned. This would’ve fixed the issue of the floating content, and it also would’ve added some cohesiveness, because this is the only part of the website that utilizes this dotted line design.

Lastly, near the end of the page they have this section showing how many emails they’ve blocked. I didn’t realize it at first, but the number I circled actually updates in real time! From the time of that screenshot to the time I’m writing this, the number has jumped to 84,652! I think this is a fun feature because not only does it show that their product is working, it’s also a fun detail that makes the site more interactive for users.

Web design

Magazine Design

Breaking The Grid

diagram image

Don Norman’s “The Psychopathology of Everyday Things” provides an insight into the world of design. More specifically, he covers some important fundamentals regarding industrial design and makes you think about how we as humans interact with objects in our day-to-day lives. When I’m doing something as simple as typing on a keyboard, I don’t really think about the keyboard itself. This reading has me questioning the design of things I use every day, such as this keyboard, and how they were made to be functional and visually appealing. Norman starts this reading by talking about something we’ve all interacted with – doors. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve pushed on a pull door or vice versa; but thankfully after this reading, I don’t feel so guilty about it because Norman suggests it’s the designer’s fault, not mine.

Beyond doors, Norman begins to discuss designs of modern devices, a bit more technological than a plain door. I found the section about “The Complexity of Modern Devices” to be particularly interesting. Norman stated that “By human standards, machines are pretty limited,” (p. 5). Personally speaking, I feel like I tend to think the opposite of that statement. I’ve always thought that there are so many things machines can do that I would never be capable of, but upon reading this I realized I was failing to consider personality and years of life experience that simple machinery can’t replicate. I had to laugh when I came across his statement that “…machines usually follow rather simple, rigid rules because of behavior” (p. 5) because of how ironic it was to my current situation. I thought it would be helpful to click the “read aloud” button on the pdf until I realized that the machine did not have a reading cadence similar to how a regular human would read the passage, instead it just robotically listed off all the words on the page, including random numbers embedded in the page that I could not even see were there. All this to say, I think I was giving machines a bit more credit than necessary, and that this was a real-time example of machinery just following rigid rules because they lack an important feature that humans use every day: common sense.

More importantly than my struggle with doors and machines, Norman uses this chapter to introduce the four fundamental principles of interaction, which are as follows:

Affordance

Norman describes affordance as “the relationship between a physical object and a person,” (p. 11). From my understanding, this is essentially the basic functionality of an object. Take sunglasses for example: sunglasses help to shade our eyes from the sun, so a pair of sunglasses affords to block brightness. In the digital world, many if not all accounts, emails, etc. require a password. A password affords privacy from our personal information. Granted, a password is only as good as the user makes it, so a commonly used or easy-to-guess password does not afford privacy.

Signifier

The purpose of a signifier, as described by Norman, is to “communicate where the action should take place,” (p. 14).  He further explains that a signifier is “any mark or sound, any perceivable indicator that communicates appropriate behavior to a person,” (p. 14). The first example I thought of for a signifier was a parking lot. Parking lots have lines and symbols all across the pavement that indicate where you can park your car, or if a spot is handicap only. Without these lines to indicate where you can park, parking lots would be a free-for-all. Another example of a signifier is the cursor on a computer. The little arrow signifies what you are hovering over with your mouse or trying to click on. Cursors are a visual representation on the screen of where you are moving your mouse from your desk.

Mapping

Norman defines mapping as “the relationship between the elements of two sets of things,” (p.20). I think the simplest example of mapping comes from the buttons on the side of your phone, also known as the volume buttons. Everyone knows that if you want to increase the volume on your phone, you would press the button on top. On the flip side of that, to decrease volume you would press the button on the bottom. Norman describes these types of controls as natural mapping, which means “taking advantage of spatial analogies” (p. 22). Another example occurs when you open the camera on your phone. Within the camera app, there is a big screen showing what you are looking at. It is very apparent to users that the big button located under the screen is used to take the picture because of the relationship between the screen and the button.

Feedback

Feedback is quite possibly the simplest principle of the four because it is already a term we are familiar with. Feedback tells us the result of an action. There are examples all around us, but let’s go back to cameras. When you take a picture on a camera, it makes a clicking noise. We know the camera took a picture because it communicates to us with a click as the result of our action. Speaking of clicks, if a user is clicking something on a website, they are often met with a spinning circle, also known as a loading symbol, in return. This lets the user know that the computer received the action from the click, and it is communicating to us with a loading screen in response.

Source

Norman, Donald A. “The Psychopathy of Everyday Things”. The Design of Everyday Things. MIT Press, 2013, pp 1-25.