Minimalist Graphic Design Ideas – Minimal graphic design is one of the most effective, attractive art styles you can use to brand your business. It is the default style for many brands today – Google, Apple, Nike, Uber and Nike to name a few – who use it for their logos, products, websites and advertisements. The style seems perfect for businesses that sell products and services.
In this article, we explore the history and definition of minimalist graphic design and the key design elements that define it. We provide many real business examples including advertising, website and app design, email campaigns and more. When you’re done, you should have a good overview of how to create your own minimalist graphic design.
Minimalist Graphic Design Ideas
Minimal graphic design is an art style that uses limited elements, lots of negative space, and a small color palette. Each design element should have a purpose and be balanced to achieve a sense of symmetry.
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The main idea of minimal graphic design is to emphasize a few essential elements used without the need for unnecessary embellishments. This can be characterized by the credo of “less is more”, which leads to the fact that everything in design is designed for a purpose. Nothing is too much; Everything is important.
Minimal design (also known as “literary art” and “ABC art”) stems from the minimalist movement that began in New York in the early 1960s. It is thought to have been influenced by the reluctance of action painting to emphasize spontaneity and free-flowing brushstrokes, as seen in the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock’s work. It was influenced by the Dutch de Stijl movement (also known as Neoplasticism), which used abstract, geometric, and small primary colors such as red, yellow, and blue. This movement was a counter-reaction to the style of art, this time the bright Art Deco style, that dominated the early 20th century.
Believed to be the first minimalist work, Russian painter Kazimir Malevich in 1915 created a simple black square on a white background to express the importance of color and form. According to the Tate Gallery of Modern Art, this is the first time a painting has been created with no one in it.
Black Square, Kazimir Malevich’s first work of minimalist art. Currently at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, My Tretyakov. Image from Wikipedia
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Early minimalist sculptors and artists included Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Don Flavin, Agnes Martin, Frank Stella, and Anne Truitt. These and other minimalist artists wanted to remove subjective meaning or interpretation from their art and focus on the art itself. The idea is to create a strong emotional response that doesn’t have to be ‘worked out’ – it just hits you. The balance of the art’s simplicity and the splendor of its elements was the whole point, without the need to frown upon and extract personal meaning. Minimal design is about experiencing these essential elements. It is a literal objectivist approach to art design heavily influenced by the Bauhaus art school in Germany, one of the most influential modernist design schools of the 20th century.
Today, minimalist graphic design is one of the most common styles used by Western companies, whose branding, product packaging and websites are given a clean, minimal style that appeals to millions of people. It is also used in advertising, email marketing, social marketing and user interfaces. The gradual simplification of brand logos indicates an ongoing graphic design trend toward minimalism, proudly displayed in the company’s brand style guide.
This style has influenced much of our modern world, including furniture (think IKEA), architecture, cars, and urban design.
When looking at minimalist graphic design, you can expect few elements, a limited color palette and a strong sense of balance. It can make you feel clearer, calmer. That’s why it’s so popular for websites and software applications that may look simple and attractive, but are full of complex functionality behind the scenes.
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Simplicity is perhaps the most obvious characteristic of minimalist graphic design. It tends to use certain elements and
Negative spaces that attract the viewer’s eye to objects and intensify them. Apple is famous for this style, with the new MacBook Pro packaging featuring just one image on the front: the laptop itself. The device is a beautiful design, and Apple highlights it in the packaging using these minimalist design principles. It does the same on its website, where product pages usually display a product image in glorious full-screen mode, as shown below.
By adopting a clean design with carefully selected essential elements, they have a greater impact on the viewer and are therefore more memorable. This is why minimalism is the design style for many companies today. This enables them to showcase their products and services with expressive simplicity.
Negative space in minimalist design is usually white or black, but it doesn’t have to be. As long as the room highlights important design elements, any color will work, as shown in the whimsical flamingo-office worker image below. This is a great example of combining minimalist design principles with surrealism to create an almost shocking effect that is likely to grab people’s attention – perfect for advertising.
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Since cleanliness is essential in minimalist design, the number of elements that can be used is limited, so they must have a real purpose. In theory, the fewer elements used on a page, the easier the design is to understand and the more effective it is. A quote from French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint can guide us when creating minimal graphic design:
“Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
If your design is full of shapes and colors without direction or meaning, you’re probably on the wrong track. Be ruthless about taking things away and you can end up with something surprisingly uncomplicated and truly minimalistic.
Take this genius ad for German hat company Hut Weber from Advertising Agency Service Project. With two simple pictures, he highlighted the main difference between Charlie Chaplin and Hitler – the hat. It conveys the idea that the hat has the power to turn evil into good, and it does so with just a few black shapes and text on a clean background. Due to the lack of ink, this ad was also cheaper to print.
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As another example, we can turn to our own e-magazine – Powered Up. Although this design could use several colors to be truly minimalistic, we make sure that each element has a purpose to clearly show importance and what to focus on. It works well: We consistently achieve high click and open rates in our email marketing. Click here if you want to subscribe!
The more colors used in the design, the more noisy it will appear. Psychedelic design is a good example of a style that uses a lot of color to create an intense, trippy effect that mimics the experience of using LSD. Minimal graphic design is the polar opposite, with limited, carefully selected elements to create expression and limited colors to deepen effect.
Traditional minimalist art tended to use flat, single-tone colors, as shown in the example below. But the style has evolved since then, and today’s minimalist designers are happy to use color gradients and textures that keep the look clean and help achieve the desired emotional impact.
This example by designer Tom Anderson is a beautiful example of using simple color in a minimalist design to promote stylish Sanquist bags. The stark contrast between the white space on the left and the color on the right is almost surprising and creates a real “wow” effect that effectively advertises products. Choosing a color (or lack thereof) that creates clear contrast is an important element of minimalist design, and Anderson has accomplished this with great skill.
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A minimalist design is balanced, but not necessarily symmetrical. On a web page, a bold, bold title can be balanced with an image. Can the logo be balanced with the menu button? The example below shows a perfectly balanced minimal home page design that uses a combination of graphics, text and UI elements.
Balance can be achieved using an invisible ‘grid’ system that facilitates a sense of symmetry. Today’s websites use true grid systems to display elements on each page, as it makes things much easier for developers and provides a more pleasing look. Balance helps create a clear visual hierarchy, allowing users to understand the meaning of each section and element of the page.
In artwork, balance can be achieved through the combination of colors and shapes as shown in this clever piece below.
As humans, we unconsciously associate symmetry with order