Lesson 8 - Sustainable Web Design In 20 Lessons
The entire 8th chapter of the book Sustainable Web Design In 20 Lessons.
Lightweight and minimalistic design
In this lesson, we will discuss lightweight and minimalistic design, two significant parts of sustainable web design. When I say lightweight, I am, of course, implying the opposite of heavy; when I say minimalistic, I mean that the design is the opposite of bloated and filled with useless data. Just to clarify before getting started.
In this chapter, you will discover the power of minimalism and that sometimes less is more. Designs don’t always have to be filled with fancy images and videos to be modern. Sometimes simple is better, and sometimes less is saying the most. If you analyze ten random websites, you will see that most of them use many images. But the images are not related to the content.
Take a moment to look at the images and ask yourself, “What is this website about?” For the most, your guess will be different from reality, which is because we blindly include images for design instead of the purpose of understanding. In this lesson, you will learn to serve your content more effectively using less bloat, and you will learn about only including what matters. You must consider what you add to the internet and take responsibility for it. Does this piece of content serve a purpose? Does it help your readers understand? Or is it simply confusing?
The image above shows Bolagsverket’s homepage, and we will use that to demonstrate the use of non-describing images that don’t help us understand the content. The first image we see showcases a woman sitting with her phone. She is in front of her desk, and her laptop is in front of her. We can also see that her phone is currently charging, and the cord is attached to the charging dock behind the computer. This section’s headline is “Keep track of your company with My Pages.” So this is a section that describes the benefits of using their “My pages” web application to keep track of information regarding a company. If you look at the image and analyze it, you wouldn’t be able to see that this section is about a web application. It might as well have been about work-life balance or increased suicide rates for people working in offices. Maybe a section about desk posture or even about women being great bosses. At first glance at the image, this section could have been about almost anything, and without the text, we wouldn’t have been able to figure out what it was about. If the section instead included an image with screenshots from the actual web application, we would have been able to guess that the given image was about software created by Bolagsverket.
