When Minimal Became Too Minimal

When I started working on this website, I kept coming back to two words: minimal and modern.

I wanted a quiet place for my writing. A short introduction, a few articles, and a simple way to move around. Nothing that would compete with the words.

The first design had soft colours, rounded cards, and small details around the links. I liked parts of it, but wondered whether it could be simpler. So, with the AI tools I was using to build the site, I started removing things.

The cards became plain rows. The colourful tags turned grey. The background faded towards white. Each change sounded reasonable on its own.

Then I looked at the whole page.

I preferred what we had before.

A clean page that didn’t feel like mine

There was nothing obviously broken. The links worked. The text was readable. The layout had been checked on different screen sizes.

But I didn’t enjoy looking at it. Almost everything had the same quiet tone, and the details I had liked were gone. I had asked for less clutter and ended up with less character.

That was the part I had missed when discussing individual changes. A softer border or a smaller label sounds like a tiny decision. Make enough of those decisions together, and the whole page feels different.

I also realised that “minimal and modern” was a very incomplete description of what I wanted. I could recognise the feeling when I saw it, but I hadn’t explained it well.

Seeing it before building it

We changed the process. Before making more changes to the site, we created visual previews and compared them.

That made the conversation much easier. I could point to something specific: too much purple, cards that were too large, or an image that looked artificial. Those observations were more useful than asking for the page to be “cleaner” again.

Some colour came back. I chose orange as a small reference to the Netherlands, where I live. We brought back the cards, added small article covers, and tried a left-hand menu. When the cards felt too large, we made them more compact.

None of these choices was particularly dramatic. Together, they made the site feel closer to something I would choose for myself.

Where I stopped removing things

I still like simple websites. I want comfortable reading, clear navigation, and space around the content.

But a little colour and a small illustration can belong there too. They were part of what made me want to spend time on the page.

The useful question became: do I like the page more after this change? Sometimes the answer was yes. Sometimes it meant bringing something back.

For now, I’m happy with a quiet layout, a few orange details, and room for the next post.