Perhaps it is so beautiful that somehow I feel less inspired to mindlessly browse videos like I do in YouTube (say, for example, Keyboard Cat videos (arguably brillant in their own right)).  Vimeo makes me more inspired to search for, I don’t know, interpretive dance or clips of opera singers.  Can clutter-free design reduce the clutter in our thoughts?   Anyhow, this morning I cannot get past the bold and beautiful Vimeo : look at those magnifcent colors, look at those huge buttons…and a bold maneuver : my personal avatar is HUGE.   Kudos to the designers : I love you.

Yes, that’s right.  Twitter’s design came from the mastermind of a 21 year old Brazilian kid, which sort of makes me feel like a plant-eating brontosaurus.   Twitter  is stripping down communication to its bare essentials or to its most mundane (to debate), and I am sure that eventually, we’ll find a way to communicate in baby talk or we’ll go back to the telegraph.  Being quite verbose, I was never fond of Hemmingway-like prose or communication but I have always been a fan of minimalism in terms of architecture and design.  That said, I am not drawn to Twitter’s function but I am drawn to its aesthetic, and I do not appear to be the only one…

I notice that there are a lot of “stripped” web 2.0 sites surfacing out there and here I’ll list three of my favorites : Vimeo (a video-sharing site), Tumblr (a blog creator) and Muxtape (a music sharing site made with Tumblr).

Imagine YouTube without the clutter.  Imagine Blogger without the clutter.  Imagine MySpace (especially MySpace) without the clutter.  Could we create a thesis and say that way back when, this is how Google dominated the web and only now other sites are catching on?  Because essentially Google is a logo and a search box and in the first step, they not trying to hawk anything else.  In fact, there is something modest and genuine about the fact that Google does not visibly hawk its products and there is even something humble and endearing about the fact that a lot of Google Apps have been labled “BETA” (in progress) for the past five years.   For all of the above, a lot of people don’t even know that (free and amazing) Google Apps even exist.

When a web site is not dowsed with unnecessary ads and content, the experience is all the more rich and pure.  It is contrary to the motto that in web design, space (pixels) is precious and should not be wasted.  This motto derives from our antiquated assumptions about screen size and search engines.   Au contraire….sometimes word of mouth and tactful marketing beats arbitrary web browsing, hence, empty pixels are making a comeback.