I am interested in minimal design, from design (ie. minimalist design) and performance view points. I am trying out "zero images" approach at the moment.
(obviously no flash/silverlight/etc) pure html+css(+js)
Has anyone tried it, seen it, thought about it.
To give an example, craigslist would be minimalist design. It has 0 images, 1 css, 1 js.
StackOverflow is NOT minimal design (although it seems so).
Thanks.
Would creating applications that are not minimalist but that degrade gracefully be an option? The big thing that a lot of customers want is "wow" factor and that is hard to achieve by being minimalistic.
Have you tried the 960 framework? It's pretty minimalist and works a treat. Obviously you can do away with the column images used for the demo, the rest is css and html.
I've thought about it a lot over the last 13 years I've made websites. I think it comes down to one thing. "What is the intent of the site?" Depending on what the intent is, will drive what level of interactivity, level of complexity, depth of user interface required, and to your point, the amount of images required to fulfill the intent.
Have to agree with dominicminicoopers on this one. You need to understand the intended target audence as well as the methods they'll use to access this site in order to know if it makes sense to use this type of style. If the site is to be used in small mobile devices or very slow internet connections then i could see why you'd like to reduce the amount of graphics and files. If, on the other hand, they will use higher speed connections, then why not make the site as attractive as possible? I'm not saying that graphics are essential to make any site atractive, but they certainly help.
Good Luck!
Andres
To dominicminicoopers and Andres:
well, that's true, and that's why I want to explore this approach so I can use it best, once an opportunity arises. Indeed, there are audiences for Flash/Silverlight.