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Dovetailing nicely with my appeal for some new cliches, Elliot Jay Stocks of Carsonified recently did a talk called “Destroy The Web 2.0 Look.”

Thank you, Mr. Stocks! Excellent presentation. That presentation is suitable for a ChangeThis manifesto, if you ask me.

Personally, I think some of the elements of typical “web 2.0″ design wouldn’t be that bad… if they were not slavishly applied to Every Single New Web Site/Application/doohickey that we see fly off the shelf. But since they are, I think a backlash is long overdue. Vive la revolution! Let’s not reflect a logo, for a change.

Of course, this means that people will need designers to actually design again, rather than just going through all the “2.0″-ish Photoshop tutorials they found on Smashing Magazine or Mashable. Good!

The slide show:

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I read not too long ago that I could request an invite to the preview of the new Del.icio.us site.

So, I promptly did so. I just noticed this morning that the invite came in.

I love the new interface. It can’t be rolled out soon enough. It looks great, and I’m one of those people who believes that how a page/application looks does matter. No, it doesn’t need to be flashy, and looks don’t trump functionality, but it still matters (Ma.gnolia has arguably looked better than del.icio.us for years, but I still preferred del.icio.us, because despite not being exquisitely designed, the UI was still great. If the UI had sucked, that would be a different story).

A taste:

Some things:

• The Look and Feel. This stands out first. I love it; it looks like del.icio.us, but cleaner. It seems to present more information, but it doesn’t look cluttered, confusing, or busy. There are several shades of blue and gray, which adds some nice variety and gives a very good feeling overall. Win.
• The “tag” field; notice in the screen snip above, the “Type a tag” field right next to my username (just above the list of bookmarks.) Type a tag, press return, and voila; the list is filtered for that tag. A very cool addition, as soon as you do this, the line changes to look something like a bread crumb trail, to “username > tag > “Type another tag”. You can filter out tags, as many as you like, and each of them has a little “x” next to the tag, so you could search filter for 4 tags and then decide to cut out just one of them… or two… in any order. /me likes; win.

Can we all agree that the new interface is awesome? Perhaps not, since you may not have used it. I will prematurely begin to agree with this sentiment and wait for you all to catch up. No worries: I’ll be here.

There’s a definite trend towards minimalism in web design. This is offset by a parallel trend towards bright, flashy, web design.

I like bright, flashy web design just fine, as long as it’s done well. There are a lot of great examples of this sort of design, but I’ll save that for another post.

I think there are quite a few compelling reasons for the attraction of minimalist web design, and I don’t think “I’m not a designer” is the main reason. It’s probably a common reason, and it’s better to go with a minimalist design that looks good than it is to go with a graphic design that looks bad. I don’t think “minimalist” should be equated with a lack of graphic design, however. A strong, primarily text-based, design is still a graphic design, as anyone who has studied typography, grid layouts, and/or publication design will attest. However, blogs like Subtraction and InformationArchitects are great examples that minimalist designs can also be stellar graphic designs.

There are some compelling reasons why minimalism in web design is more than just a way to avoid spending hours in Illustrator or Photoshop.

The first is the one I’ve already alluded to: minimalism in graphic design is still a graphic design. Now, as far as web design goes, there are a couple different extremes you could go towards: I’ve already mentioned Khoi Vinh’s excellent Subtraction design. It’s very calculated, well-planned, and well-executed. Other websites give the impression of having been barely styled at all. Dave Winer’s Scripting News would seem to fit well here, though he’s recently added some Ajax, and though he tends to favor many styles that look like HTML defaults, there’s obviously a lot of CSS going on there — it’s just a very different style of minimalism than Khoi Vinh’s. (I can’t think of any weblogs or sites that are left completely unstyled, thought I recall that Bryan Veloso left AvalonStar unstyled for awhile once when he was between theme-designs.)

The rest of the benefits flow from that first observation. I want to write that a minimal design will accentuate usability, but that’s not necessarily true. You could have a very minimalist design and still hide your navigation or RSS feed in the bottom right corner of a long page that I have to scroll down to find. You could hide your navigation links behind nice, modern-looking icons, but provide no text to tell me what the links point to. There are a lot of ways you could be minimalistic and still have a pretty un-user friendly web interface. However, I do think that choosing to do a minimalistic design makes it a little easier to notice and consider these things. If you’ve decided you’re only going to have a few links in your sidebar, you’ll probably consider which links you decide to put there. You’ll probably stop to think that the one(s) you want people to notice should go at or near the top. And so forth.

Thirdly, even though a minimalist design is still a graphic presentation, the design is played down to the point where it is (hopefully) nearly invisible. Hopefully, this will shift the focus to the content of your page, which may or may not be what you want.

As I write this, I’m aware (and hopefully you are as well) that a well-designed page that is heavier on graphic elements should ideally still have all these characteristics; it should be usable, should accentuate content over style, should be easy to read. Basically then, other than the fact that you need not be a Photoshop or Illustrator wizard, a minimalist design is just another one of many choices you could make. It’s a design style that says something, just like the current glossy “Web 2.0″ style says something, the chaotic clash of colors that is a typical myspace page says something, a clean, colorful graphic design says something… it’s just one choice among many. I think a good minimalist design takes just as much thought and planning as any other type, even if you go completely unstyled — you still have to measure the pros and cons of that, and decide in what order your elements should appear on the page.

Minimalism is not necessarily better, more readable, or more usable; it’s just a different design mode.