Blog Post #5 - Bad Minimalism

The website I decided to review for bad minimalist design is Gold Bear Hotel. Their approach to minimalist design falls flat in just about every area that minimalism should excel at in order to make a successful website.

The first falter is the layout itself. Their choice of arrangement, alignment and composition has no defining structure. Pictures and text don't line up to each other which does not give the site a cohesive feel. Unfortunately, this is not a problem that just effects the layout of one page, it continues throughout the entire website.

The type treatment is right out of the birth of the internet. Drop shadows are misused and only served to make a poorly-colored text even harder to read. The typography also isn't varied enough to actually make anything look interesting. The logo itself also showcases some bad typography, the 'Goldener Baer' placement needs to be rethought.

What little photography there is, does not look appealing. All the photographs are small and unaltered to give them their best colors and contrasts. The result is a rather dull, unstimulating view of their hotel when the photographs should showcase their hotel. The repeating background picture tends to conflict with some of the black text it resides behind. A better choice would be to set a white or lighter background behind the text, which would also give the site more structure.

On a more minor note, the site also has the perplexing tendency to put borders around buttons. This choice seems to just be redundant and unnecessary considering buttons already have their edges bordered out. The borders are completely unneeded and should be removed.

Minimalist design relies on each element being strong because each one is that much more important than if it was a different style of design. Unfortunately, the elements here are not strong and site collapses into bad design.