minimalist design - fashionable or overdone to death?

Anyone who has been around to remember the 2000s and some of the 2010s will have noticed the major shift that design has taken towards minimalism, as explored in previous posts, many logos, UIs and about everything else went towards the minimalist approach, long gone (mostly) are the days when you'd open a website to be bombarded by flashing banners, a choice of buttons to click so big it would confuse you as the user and an overwhelming amount of colours being throw into the palette.

Nowadays, sites have taken on a uniform look, usually a white background, a few core options to pick from (e.g, for a clothing website: Mens, Women's, Kids, Accessories), everything symmetrical, aligned perfectly, each item section looking the same. For the most part, this is a good approach; it's simple for the user, and it makes the website more inviting.

However, has minimalism gone too far?, Websites feel like they have no 'soul' anymore, no identity compared to their preceding designs. I am going to compare the current website of 'Hot Topic', an American fashion retailer with wide popularity in the mid-2000s to the early 2010s as to see what changes it has gone throughout as the years passed.

Present

Screenshot of hottopic.com dated May 12th 2025

The design, as spoken about in the paragraph above, is neat, using a black and white colour scheme for the website base, perhaps for readability with the standard options you'd expect at the top as well as quick links to the basket, account options. Quite standard. For comparison and to prove my point, below is the H&M website.

Screenshot of hm.com dated May 12th 2025

Different website, different company, essentially the same design. Options at the top, some pictures of the articles sold. You could essentially swap the media from one to the other (the images) and the branding (logos and mentions of the brand), and you'd end up with the same website. Which brings me to the point I was making, websites are all copies of each other nowadays, besides a few minor giveaways, not much is giving away who the website is for, H&M, Hot Topic, Primark? All the same.

What was it like before?

Looking at Hot Topic, for instance, in the 2010s, you will notice that there's just more soul to it, mostly throught minor details such as background, some graphics and such, quite easy edits to make but that tie in the website in a much better way than the present version.

Screenshot of hottopic.com dated Nov 15th 2010

The layout is okay, it's neat, the branding is visible (unfortunately due to limitations with WayBackMachine) some elements of this page were lost, but enough was preserved to see the essence of the website back them, it was simple yet had personality, small details like that went a long way to tie the website to the brand and their identity, unlike nowdays in my opinion.

So, has minimalism killed 'good' design?, It's a subjective question really with no right

answer, some will advocate that the new layout and designs companies are utilising are far

superior, with some arguing that websites, while cluttered and perhaps a bit scuffed, were

their design of choice. Personally, I do believe that there is such thing as too much

minimalism, reducing the elements of the website to a sterile shell, the equivalent of having

your entire room painted in white, with all white furniture without any other splashes of

colour.

This could easily be fixed with little effort, just splashing more elements on the pages and

associating the website with the brand identity and values of the company, but of course, this

is preferential, so whether companies will go down the old route again someday all depends

on the demographic trends and preferences, which are ever shifting.