The Anatomy of a Perfect Web Site

The author is a Swedish designer. He sees the world with the Northern European, Braun and IKEA mindset: minimalist and functional.<p>I respect and like it. But only for things and spaces that you need to use so often that you almost forget they exist. And only works for people that are open to this approach.<p>In some cultures (e.g: India and South America) you'd need to put a lot of gold and bling to catch people's attention. We like it baroque/art-noveau style: flamboyant, shiny and extravagant like a Carnaval parade or a Bollywood movie.

The best design for a site depends heavily on who it is targeted at.<p>It is simply not true that a bare minimum is best for all sites.<p>The example site is an academic and very functional site, and will appeal to a person who goes to it looking for specific and easily accessible information.<p>As a site for drawing the interest of children, or teenagers it will probably fail.<p>As a site for getting people to buy a product it will probably fail.

I agree that the website is quite functional and presents great content but I don't believe it conveys great design aesthetics. Some of the problems that I instinctively felt were:<p>- Intuitively I do not expect the clickable diagrams to be 'clickable'. It is sort of hidden in a plain looking site. If you don't look carefully, you might miss it.<p>- The choice of colors are inconsistent across the site.<p>- Unlike what the closing note suggests, it would be a little challenging to adopt the table-based 2-column layout for a more 'responsive design' suiting smaller screens.

"Design without context is not design. It’s noise."

I can't possibly upvote this enough. 99% of websites I visit have too much style, and I think it's better to go under than over.

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I don't understand the point, even a minimalist design is a design.

This is Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway corporate website: <a href="http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/</a><p>It's very simple and clean.