Top 25 Clean and Minimal Web Designs
Clean and minimal designs are my favorite type of design style – they have a very classy, professional, and timeless look to them that really appeals! With more and more designers adopting this type of style there are now lots of great clean and minimal designs around on the Web.
In this post I discuss what actually constitutes a clean and minimal design and also highlight 25 of my favorite designs using this type of style.
What Are Clean and Minimal Designs?
The answer to this question is very subjective and you’d no doubt get lots of varying responses from different designers – however, there are a number of core elements that you typically find in such designs.
Only Include The Essentials!
Minimal designs only include what’s absolutely necessary and nothing more! There’s a real art to getting this right – take it too far and you’ll have a site that looks bare and amateurish. Get it right and you’ll have a professional and stylish design – getting that balance right can be a difficult thing to master!
White Space
One of the common attributes that clean and minimal designs have is extensive use of white space. This means that all the page elements are nicely spaced out which helps to guide the user to the most important elements on the page (as opposed to having lots of elements competing for their attention).
Typography
Another common element is the use of nice typography – you’ll typically see large text used as the logo in a minimal design as well as for the main headers on a page. If you have a strong contrast between the background and text color it can create a real impact and look very professional.
Font Color
The subtle use of colors is another core component in minimal designs – you don’t tend to see Web 2.0 type coloring where there are large blocks of pink, purple, and lime green gradients – instead, you’ll typically see (at most) two or three more traditional colors being used subtly around the design.
Background Color
The same also applies with background colors – you’ll normally see a plain color being used, as opposed to a background with an image or pattern included. This helps to keep the focus of the design on the content as opposed to the design itself.
25 Clean and Minimal Designs
Below are some of my favorite clean and minimal designs from around the Web – not all of them completely adhere to the points highlighted above, but I think they can all be classed as professional and clean designs.
Moulton Studio
Pixel Umbrella
Izabela Kurkiewicz
31Three
Oscar Barber
Brian Hoff
SlideDeck
MaxVoltar
The Post Family
30elm
Kilpp og Lim
Erskine Design
Berit Somme
Darren Hoyt
X3 Studios
Kyle Sollenberger
Hot Meteor
Surfstation
Astheria
Hair Ott
PixelBot
Huge Inc
Made By On
Patrick Monkel
December 16th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
Very nice collection Chris!
I enjoy minimal web designs a lot
Thanks for sharing!
December 17th, 2009 at 4:02 am
Cheers Marco
December 16th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
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December 16th, 2009 at 8:53 pm
This is an excellent collection, featuring a number of new and impressive sites that I haven’t seen featured elsewhere. I very much appreciate how you prefaced this collection with solid context and suggestions for designing a site with minimalist flair. Bravo!
December 17th, 2009 at 4:06 am
Thanks Len!
December 16th, 2009 at 8:57 pm
Very nice. Personally, HUGE is one of my favorite websites. Very clean and well designed. Thank you for this round-up. I just bookmarked it and will refer back to it for inspiration.
December 17th, 2009 at 4:09 am
Yeah – I really like the HUGE design as well – it’s a good example how a simple and clean design can look very professional.
December 17th, 2009 at 12:53 am
Hi,
I wanted to take a second to say that I am flattered that you’ve included my site, moultonstudio.com, in your list. I appreciate you including me in the list with so many really fantastic examples. I think that you nailed it in your write up on what I was hoping to achieve.
Thanks again,
David Moulton
December 17th, 2009 at 4:11 am
Hi David – thanks for your comment – it’s a great design!
December 17th, 2009 at 9:22 am
You forgot to include 3 best minimalist web, google, flickr and facebook
.
And I like “The Post Family” and 30elm
Nice list
December 17th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
Good point ferdhie
Although I’m not sure how “minimal” the design of Facebook is as there’s typically lots of different things being displayed that are constantly competing for your attention (e.g. friend requests, events, invitations, suggestions, sponsored ads, etc.). I assume that’s why they created Facebook Lite, so that users can have a much simpler, cleaner and less “noisy” interaction experience.
December 17th, 2009 at 10:18 am
top notch selection of minimal websites! some of them I’ve features in one my posts as well. I especially like Huge and Darren Hoyt. keep up the good work.
December 17th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Thanks Alex!
December 17th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Nice looking sites, though I’m starting to think the trend of having the giant “HELLO I’m a graphic designer/developer/artist and I make blah blah blah” is starting to become over-used.
December 17th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
Yeah, I agree – although there are still some really nice designs that use that type of header/featured section.
December 17th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
2 thumb
December 17th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
I really like the first one “Moulton Studio”. I think it really defines the quote “Simplicity is beauty”. I just love the totality of the site. Looks very nice to me.
December 18th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
Yeah, it’s one of my favorites too.
December 18th, 2009 at 8:48 am
Hi GREAT WORK！
December 18th, 2009 at 11:27 am
Excellent examples of clean functional web design. My personal favorite is the Kyle Sollenberger site. Thanks for taking the time to put this great collection together for us.
December 21st, 2009 at 12:03 pm
very cool sites. Really minimal design. Coold be my site put in this category to? What do you think?… It’s in portuguese, maybe it’s wiil a problem…
December 23rd, 2009 at 10:48 pm
Great read ! Have you looked at http://www.vivapixel.com ? I think that it too could be considered clean and minimal… what do you think ?
January 3rd, 2010 at 4:47 pm
Superb selection!
February 13th, 2010 at 2:28 pm
Very nice list, great inspiration! I don’t see flash designs here, is that on purpose? I have been following this designer ( http://hakki.com ) His site is super clean, aaaand I love the pistachio green so I like it very much
Thanks for the post
June 6th, 2010 at 11:29 am
Thanks for sharing.
Check Vida Sencilla (also clean and minimal): http://www.vidasencilla.es/
I hope you’d like it.