In my previous post, I mentioned that Minimalissimo was coming to an end and that I'd be embarking on a new adventure with FormFeelingFunction®. Well, I think it's worth explaining the site's journey, impact, and inevitable sunset. Because it has played a significant role in my life for well over a decade and deserves a few words to bring this story some closure.
Back in 2009, the world was emerging from a massive recession and people were looking to simplify their lives. This introduced a natural draw towards minimalism. Not just as a lifestyle choice, but as a way to shape physical environments and products. This movement led to the birth of Minimalissimo as one of the original blogs to showcase and celebrate minimal design. There were far fewer design blogs around in those days, especially ones focused on the niche of minimalism. But readership slowly grew, as did the number of voluntary editors of the site. And so, as an avid reader myself, I volunteered to research and share my findings across the web. Turns out, I was pretty good at this, and from 2012, I essentially led our small team to push the standards of design curation.
Between 2011 and 2015, minimalissimo.com was undoubtedly the most read and respected minimal design blog on the web. Sure, there were other massive publications that dwarfed our little site, but within our niche, no site offered the same level of consistent quality in curation. We were easily hitting over 100k unique visits to the site per month. At this point, we had accumulated over 6 years of posts spanning a wide variety of art, architecture, and design, so it felt like a natural step to evolve Minimalissimo into both a printed and digital publication. Particularly as print was thriving at the time. This then led to a trio of self-published magazines that each sold incredibly well. I'm still massively proud of those volumes and you can still get your hands on the digital versions today.
Our work in print design led to collaborative opportunities and so we ventured into more areas of product design. We made a limited edition timepiece with HODINA. We made a split-fountain diptych print series with Berger & Föhr. We also collaborated with Studio Lenzing to create elegant wallpaper and icon sets — all fun projects driven by a shared love of minimalism. These projects were made with care and never treated as revenue generators. Yes, all projects were profitable, but none of them blew up. But that's OK. Our output was still something to be extremely proud of.
By 2019, the volume of design blogs and magazines on the web was huge. Many began to look the same and we began to notice so much recycled content. Curation was becoming increasingly challenging if we wanted to maintain distinctiveness. On top of this, social media was very quickly eating away at indie websites like a plague. Our readership was declining year after year, and the pressures of pumping more energy into social media platforms to be noticed and relevant was a huge time sink. And it stunk. Much like the algorithms we'd all have to navigate in the years that followed. We were fighting a losing battle.
So in recent years, I began working a lot more with Manu Moreale. Together, we decided to defy trends, experiment where possible, and focus on what we could control. We crafted various iterations of the website, trying various methods of how readers would engage with the site. We also experimented with a lot of monetisation strategies, including memberships, donations, unobtrusive ads, shop promotions, and so on. Some worked, some didn't. But fuck it, we tried. And we enjoyed the ride and the connections we made along the way.
Ultimately, we feel we've respectfully given enough to the web, dedicating 15 years to it. But all labours of love come to an end eventually. It's actually mad to think how long this thing lasted. So although our curation ends here, the website will continue to exist as a digital archive. Which means you can still enjoy and discover beautiful minimalism from thousands of artists and designers.
For the time being, we'll continue publishing a monthly newsletter, so please subscribe to that if you still want to see what we find on the web.
To all our Minimalissimo readers; thank you for stopping by.