This is a minimal blog.
Right? It says so in the About page, why wouldn’t it be? It aims to do as much as possible with as little as possible; that’s its design language.
But, what’s minimal design as opposed to functional design?
Minimal Design
Started in the 1960’s, a response to Abstract Expressionism-Yeah yeah, you’ve read the Wikipedia page. That’s its origins, but what is it in substance?
In my eyes, minimalism is about reduction: You start with a concept, you think about a thing to represent that concept, and then you try to remove as much from that thing as possible to the point just before the concept is lost. To volume, a sphere is its minimum surface area; to a concept, a “minimal” design is its minimum visual footprint.
However, a perfect sphere is hard to create, every imperfection will show in its glossy surface, and in an attempt to maximise volume you’ve now maximised work.
Just to clarify: A sphere is a maximum, there are shapes with more complexity for a given volume, and instead, I’m interpreting a perfect sphere as being a local maxima in complexity.
Functional Design
If the above definition of minimal design is “concept per unit visuals”, I’m defining functional design as “concept per unit visuals per unit work”.
Think of it in terms of compression in computing: You can compress content further by investing more computational power towards it; compression level 9, however, the compression and decompression rate often suffers for it. So, a functional design is equivalent to compression level 1, in that it simplifies the obvious, but doesn’t invest time into more nuanced deduplication and pattern finding. It’s as easy to consume as it is to create (visually).
The optimal design under these conditions is where every involved party benefits: Creators can design easily, Storage can fit it somewhere easily, and Consumers can understand it easily. And that is OVERHEAD.
As an example, minimal design would probably do away with header images, as the “substance” of this blog is its text, but I’ve chosen to use pixel art because:
- It’s easy to understand and is visually pleasing.
- It’s easy to store, with this post’s header image being 488 bytes.
- And, it’s easy to create (in theory anyways, the header image for the Hugo tag taught me otherwise).
So, you’re changing the About?-
Heeell no! I ain’t explaining functional design every time someone asks, which they will because I’ve made this whole thing up; go look at the Wikipedia page to compare, so yeah, I’m gonna take the functional route… and save having to repeat myself.