Did anyone actually teach us how to use Google?……Nah, it was pretty simple.
Let’s flip the perspective for a moment. Take a quick look at your surroundings, but don’t stare for more than 8 seconds (that’s about as long as our attention span). Now, close your eyes and try to recreate what you saw.
What details were you able to recall? Was it the complex stuff like written information or object structures? Or was it the simple things like colors and positions?
Now, check out the logos below. Do you notice a common pattern across all those famous logos?
Despite the advancements in design techniques and tools since their initial versions, the modern forms are simpler. These iconic logos aim to convey more with less.
Minimalism has been around for ages and can be found in almost everything, like the emergency numbers: 100, 101, 102 , we easily remember without constant learning.
Brands have embraced minimalism not just for better recall but for a wide range of benefits. Let’s explore some of them:
- Enhanced Focus & Brand Recall: Minimalistic designs cut out unnecessary clutter, allowing us to focus on what matters.
Google understood this early on, with a homepage featuring a logo, search bar, and essential navigation links. No distractions. In contrast, government websites often lack this simplicity, making navigation a hassle.
- Faster Scaling: Minimalism enables faster scaling of products. Just think about Google again. No one taught you how to use it, yet almost every digital user relies on it.
Minimalistic designs facilitate:
Efficient Communication: Communication gets hindered when designs become overly complex, cluttered, or overloaded with information.
Increased Accessibility: Designs with cluttered layouts, complex navigation, and insufficient color contrast can hinder accessibility.
Adaptability: Complex designs hinder the user experience as they differ across different devices and screen sizes.
- Functional Improvements: Complex designs slow down loading times and hinder functionality. Research has shown that:
Source : Loadstorm, E consultancy
Minimalistic concepts don’t create unnecessary load, hence keeping things smooth and efficient.
- Fast Designs: Minimalism is like ethical fashion, in comparison to fast fashion. It entails creating timeless designs with fewer objects. Take Nike’s logo, which has remained largely the same since 1971, maintaining its essence.
- Sustainability: Minimalism applies not only to digital design but also to physical objects. It adds value while conserving resources and reducing waste. By optimizing resource utilization, minimalism contributes to sustainability.
Minimalism has worked in favor of brands, helping them improve customer recall, scale faster, enhance functionality, and promote sustainability. It’s about conveying more with less.
While minimalism does revolve around the fact of conveying more with less, it’s important for us to understand the pillars that make it up.
- Streamline and Simplify: A company’s logo that includes intricate details, multiple colors, and complex graphical elements, can make it visually overwhelming.
A minimalistic approach on the other hand would include clean lines, minimal colors, and a streamlined design that retains the essence of the brand.
- Prioritize Quality over Quantity: A brand bombards its customers with numerous promotional calls, each filled with excessive text, multiple offers, and numerous images, can push the customer away then bringing them closer.
The brand, which adopts a minimalist marketing approach, sends fewer but higher-quality marketing initiatives that focus on a single clear message.
- Purposeful and Intentional Branding: If a brand’s presence lacks a cohesive strategy, with strategies ranging from unrelated areas and inconsistent patterns, it confuses the customer about the value proposition of the brand.
Atari, a gaming giant, lost its entire market share, when it pivoted its legacy of making games to manufacturing computers in categories owned by IBM and Apple. Not only was Atari unsuccessful in its attempt to do so, it also lost the market share of making games to Nintendo who captured the gap left open by Atari.
Minimalism would entail the brand to develop a deliberate strategy aligned with its core values and target audience.
- Mindful Branding: A brand uses generic, cliché phrases and visuals in its advertisements without considering their impact or relevance to the target audience.
Minimalism aligns brands to practices mindful branding, carefully crafting strategies with unique, compelling messaging that resonates with the audience, along with visually striking imagery that reflects the brand’s distinct identity.
- Embrace Essential Brand Elements: A brand’s design includes multiple graphics, overlapping patterns, and excessive text, resulting in a cluttered and confusing visual representation.
Vs
Who conveys more with less?
The brand embraces essentialism design, stripping away unnecessary elements, simplifying graphics, utilizing negative space, and focusing on key brand identifiers to create a visually appealing and cohesive design.
- Seek Balance and Harmony in Branding: A brand’s visual identity uses inconsistent colors, varying font styles, and unbalanced layouts across different brand collaterals, leading to a lack of visual harmony.
The brand establishes visual harmony by selecting a cohesive color palette, consistent typography, and balanced layouts that create a unified and harmonious brand presence across all touchpoints.
- Appreciate Brand Space and Silence: A brand’s advertisement is filled with excessive visuals, text, and rapid scene transitions, overwhelming the viewer and diluting the core message.
The brand creates an impactful advertisement by utilizing white space, minimalist visuals, and deliberate pauses to enhance the viewer’s focus, allowing the core message to resonate and leave a lasting impression.
Minimalism focuses on conveying more with less, streamlining and simplifying designs, prioritizing quality over quantity, adopting purposeful and intentional branding strategies, practicing mindful branding, embracing essential brand elements, seeking balance and harmony, and appreciating brand space and silence.
Way Forward:
On SM ( Social Media ) — you would have read — In ’98, Citibank and The Travelers Insurance Company merged. They hired designer Paula Scher to make a new logo. At their first meeting, Scher doodled the iconic Citi logo on a napkin. While Scher was leaving, someone from the Citi team asked, “How can it be that it’s done in a second?”
Scher replied, “It took 34 years. It’s all the experiences and knowledge in my head.”
This story proves that minimalism is powerful. With expertise, we can achieve great things in branding, user experiences, and business processes.
At Auxano, we recognize the value of minimalism:
- We opt for a streamlined approach in identifying investable startups, those who focus on their core strengths and unique value propositions. Minimalism allows us to cut through the noise and identify the essential elements that drive success.
- For our Investors, we understand the importance of clear and concise communication, providing insights and data-driven update consistently.
A playbook to follow for every process, helps us eliminate chances of errors and amend all the learning across the team efficiently and simply.
It all comes down to achieving great things by doing simple things.
Author:
Kanuj Jadwani
