Every year, many articles about the Ux design trends of the year are published. For some time now, two trends have been coming back: minimalism and brutalism.

Brutalism is a bit out of fashion, but minimalism has a bright future ahead of it.

Drawing parallels between art movements and interface design is an interesting way to convey ideas. The artistic movements have established rules, so we just have to transpose these rules to the interface design.

Art trends

Minimalism was first an artistic movement linked to painting in the 1960s.

As early as 1915, Malevitch wanted the painting to become pure and to stop representing objects. He created “Black square on white background”, laying the foundations of what would become minimalism.

In the 1960s, Ad Reinhardt produced monochrome paintings that met with some success in the art world. The goal was to make painting abstract and use a minimum of elements to create his paintings.

Minimalism then extended to sculpture, music, and especially to product design.

In Ux design, minimalism aims to remove the superfluous to focus the attention of users on what matters. There is a will to remove any secondary functionality to focus exclusively on the main one.

Removing the superfluous also goes through the graphic aspect, we will for example :

• Remove a maximum of colors unless they are used for the user’s navigation
• Use space
• Give more space to the retained elements

Brutalism is an architectural movement born in the 1950s. Post-war buildings take on a rigid, solid appearance, without any embellishment or decoration. These new buildings are opposed to all those built-in neo-Romanesque styles and dotted with sculptures, forged grills, murals.

In Ux design, brutalism translates into an absence of aesthetic elements in an interface. No frills are present, sometimes to the point of giving the impression of having a raw HTML page in front of you. Some sites from the 90s spontaneously adopted this style because of the technical limitations of the time.

Brutalism allows designing simple products as long as aesthetics do not come into play. The designers focus on functionality rather than appearance. However, this does not preclude following rules of information architecture, differentiating elements such as hyperlinks

Minimalism and Brutalism are UX design trends that seek to get rid of what is considered superfluous to focus on functionality. This does not prevent obtaining elegant interfaces with well-constructed information architecture.

But both are superfluous for Ux design. There may be other trends that will propose to focus in one way or another on the functionalities and to do without the rest and they will also be superfluous for Ux design.

All the trends proposing to simplify interfaces are paraphrasing a design rule that seems to have been forgotten: keep it simple, stupid.

Keep it simple

FAPS is a design principle attributed to engineer Kelly Johnson. Kelly worked for the US Navy in the 1960s. This included working on reconnaissance aircraft, the Dragon Lady, and the Blackbird.

The logic behind the acronym reflects Kelly Johnson’s awareness of the reality of the field: he wants his aircraft to be repaired by people with minimal training, with the tools at hand, in combat situations.

For Kelly Johnson, the FAPS was a matter of life and death. The wrong concept would have cost millions of dollars and soldiers’ lives.

Its principle then became popular in the field of product design, first military and then civilian.

FAPS is the logic behind Apple’s products, which have always tried to produce simple and intuitive objects for everyone without limiting functionality.

In software development, FAPS is a rule taught to remind that a simple program is easier to maintain, correct, and evolve. The Python guide reminds us to “prefer simple to complex and complex to complicated”.

The FAPS is a rule that originated in design and then spread to other subjects.

Any product should follow this rule. In interface design, a design centered on the main functionalities, without frills to distract the users is always to be preferred. Only then can the interface become more complex if needs exist.

Minimalism and Brutalism and all the other trends pronouncing simplicity will always be relevant simply because they are based on a universal rule of design. No matter what you call a trend, the basis is still FAPS.

Why trends are still important

Minimalism and brutalism are two important trends for Ui design. If in Ux design the principles will always be based on the FAPS, in CIE, the design rules will allow to transmit emotions and make the users want to use the developed tool. The appearance and aesthetics created will differ even if the simplicity of FAPS is respected.

As soon as the emotional aspect is important in an interface, the trends and artistic currents of the CIE take strong importance.

Following the trends in Ui and Ux design is important to stay up to date, to propose modern tools for users, and to keep their attention, but one should not fall into the trap of renaming things that already exist to sell a so-called new way of doing things. The design basis must be solid, only then can we have fun with the emotional aspect we want to transmit. After all, minimalist painters were able to create impressionistic paintings and brutalist architects were able to design fabulous buildings. The movements were born out of their choices, but their foundations were solid.