the point at which there is nothing left to take away is the point at which there is nothing left, period.
I stopped reading after this punishingly fatuous little gem.
At that moment, I realized that the author did not want to understand functional minimalism (aka elegance) and instead preferred to argue semantics. A quick skim confirmed this.
You must not have skimmed very far, because two paragraphs later he says:
> "I mention this not because it’s any sort of earth-shattering revelation, but simply because it’s important to recognize that minimalism for minimalism’s sake is just dumb. Like any other design tool, it should be a means to an end.
The thing that’s useful about reaching the point of absolute minimalism, then, is not that it’s the point at which you’ve achieved perfection, or even anything resembling your end goal. Rather, it’s the point at which you realize which of the things you’ve removed were actually important, because their absence brings them into stark focus."
... and then proceded to talk about ways he went about making content actionable rather than have administrative cruft all over the page.
I'm glad you so thoroughly understood what I was trying to say, seeing as the article was explaining the idea of focusing on content in web design.
But I knew that someone, probably quite a lot of someones, would inevitably start throwing that quote around as if it's the holy gospel of minimal design when, frankly, it's not anything of the sort.
Basing a design aesthetic on the assumption that minimalism is (per that horrific quote) about taking away everything that can be taken away is like reading Descartes and stopping just before "cogito, ergo sum".
You would think that someone who holds minimalism above all else would pay excruciating attention to the details. What's up with the horrible pacing of the text with enormous gaps everywhere? What's up with no hover state for links? What's up with the line lengths that are a little too long? Minimalism is a beautiful thing when done correctly, but it generally requires MORE work to make it beautiful. This, in my opinion, is lazy minimalism. And a bit preachy.
I stopped reading after this punishingly fatuous little gem.
At that moment, I realized that the author did not want to understand functional minimalism (aka elegance) and instead preferred to argue semantics. A quick skim confirmed this.