I would point out the portions of it that are inaccurate, but that applies to most if not all of it. How can you make such blanket statements about web design, referring to it all as minimalism or lack thereof?

This is an extremely careless piece of writing, if I’ve ever seen one. You’ve generalized things to such a degree, that minimalism has no meaning within the context of what you are describing.

True minimalism as it pertains to web design, is not about restraint. It’s about reduction. It’s about knowing when something doesn’t belong.

Taking it easy on a design, because you are lazy or intimidating by having to do a lot of coding, is not a minimalistic approach. How you can repeat this idea in one article so many times, in so many different ways… is thoroughly offensive and proves how little you’ve researched the topic. I sincerely hope you’ve had a few months to resolve this, since having wrote it.

I think apple currently have the perfect combination of simplistic yet rich application design, which seems to be adopted by every mac app developer.

To take alot of content, add it EFFECTIVELY into a site with the bare minimum styling and make it look appealing to consumers, is extremely difficult. I spent 3 weeks styling one minimalistic website and only 5 days for a complex graphically challenging site.

To say its laziness or ignorance is ignorance in itself and unless you try to see it from the other perspective then your not gonna understand.

I love complex sites with over the top styling and complex coding but prefer to keep my personal site simplistic, i have used complex coding also, to achieve this.

In my opinion, A great designer will be able to take KEY information from the client and design the website effectively to the given spec, it may or may not end up minimalistic.

Charles Rennie Macintosh used simplistic styles in his era and the 60′s were all about keeping it simple, so minimalistic is NOT a new thing and is certainly not the new MODERN.

Regards

Craig

One thing I now appreciate from this discussion – minimalism need not be all white. Twitter is a good example.

I think the test for when to use minimalism is what you want your site to “say” –

If you want your site to say, “hey, look how much is happening here!” or “we’re chock full of events/news/stuff, etc., check it out!” then minimalism is probably not for you.

If you want your site to say, “it’s pretty simple actually, just contact us” or “we’ve got gorgeous stuff, just come” – then minimalism is great.

Every site gives off a certain message and you need to decide what you want that message to be.

Never sacrifice utility, usability, and valuable content by letting the design get in the way… If you can help it.

Minimalistic design isn’t per se the lake of images.

And I hope we design for the customers of our customers

“The worm must be tasty to the fish, not the fisherman.”

Keep your design so simple as possible -but no px simpler.

Sometimes I see “pseudo”minimalistic designs: no images, poor fonts but a lot of big borders.

This designs doesn’t have the feeling of minimalistic, they are simple boring.

regards
Monika

Design Meltdown has a fairly large list of what he considers minimalist design:
http://www.designmeltdown.com/chapters/Minimal/

If this is what WDD is referring to as minimal design, than I propose rewriting the article to this:

It’s Just a Style: fine. But you can do whatever you want, just serve up quality over quantity.

Minimalism Is for “Artsy” Websites: craigslist isn’t an artsy website. But is very minimalistic.

The Ordinary Web User: will probably like a minimalist website because it loads fast and the content they need isn’t hidden under piles of superflous content and flourishes.

Content-Rich vs. Cluttered: You can have content rich minimalist design. Again, quality over quantity.

Are We Just Lazy? & Minimalism Misused: is applicable to other styles. Not just minimalism. I can say the same about WDD’s style. The header illustration looks like all the PSD tutorials kicking around and the rest is a fairly generic WP blog layout.

Intro & Wrapping Up: should probably have paid attention to art history so that talking about minimalism as an art movement is historically acurate.

On a sidenote, I’m beginning to question the value of content published here. It’s interesting that the author of this article is the same who contributed the infamous article on grids last month. Our opinions on design definitely do not align. Not that I have to be in agreement to respect someone’s opinion… but where’s the quality control here? Articles like this can be very misleading to newcomers.