Minimalism seems to be a term that is widely used, and not particularly well understood. I once wrote a post on minimalism, which I haven’t read in several years. This is my elaboration, response, and development of those ideas. It’s immanently theoretical, but useful as a way of documenting my thought process.
Minimalism Doesn’t Mean Miniature
The title of this section really sums up my argument, but let me flesh it out a bit more. Minimal typically means the least possible. “The” is an article, and if you don’t know what that means then get the hell away from me. “Possible” is an interesting term too, because it describes the telos of the endeavour itself – obviously in the case of a UI it’s the effective delivery of information and intractability to the user. “Least” is a superlative, and in some ways the heart of minimalism itself. It describes the limit of reduction, the furthest you can go without trespassing in to the area of impossibility. This goal, the least possible, is my guiding principal when creating a UI.
Miniatures are, by definition, smaller facsimiles of larger objects. But miniaturization doesn’t necessarily intimate minimalism. If something is unusable it fails the “possible” test and couldn’t be classified as minimalist at all. This is the biggest mistake most designers make when they try to make a “minimalist” interface; just because your bars are small as fuck doesn’t mean you are a minimalist genius. There are, of course, examples of minimalist interfaces that use miniature elements because those elements contribute to the possible functionality of the interface.
Minimalism is Dual Purpose
I was looking around the internet and found a chair I thought looked pretty awesome on materialicious, it’s from the design company Ventury Paris.
The thing to get from this chair is the reconceptualization of the chair leg as a part of the body of the chair itself. The front part of the chair is dual function: it influences and perhaps defines the aesthetic of the chair as a unified line following the sitting position itself AND it supports the weight of the person sitting in the chair.
This dual-purpose methodology answers Chaud’s question from another post: what’s wrong with both class coloring AND class text? Well, the former contains the information of the latter by altering the nature of the name element or the status bar color. When you color health by class color, you integrate a secondary piece of information into what used to be a simple health display. Finding ways to integrate information in this way is a central component of minimalism as an aesthetic and functional design approach.
Only Minimalism
What I’m about to say is, more or less, exceptionally controversial but I’ll say it anyway: minimalism is the end-goal of design, it is the ultimate perfection of a manufactured object, it is what every person designing their UI should strive for. There isn’t an acceptable or interesting argument against minimalism; most objections rely on a misunderstanding of minimalism as such and are rejected on face.
In a video game, the user interface is both essential and destructive – it gives the player information while depriving the user of information. Minimalism, or the reduction of the interface to the least possible is the only way to minimize the harm done by the interface while maintaining environmental awareness. There isn’t an adequately organic method of giving players information in such a complex game, so the zero-sum relationship is more or less inevitable. As players and designers, our job must be to reduce to the last possible – in other words, every interface must be minimalist or be dismissed.
