Over the years web designers have seen many trends come and go. While very few design trends will ever be thought of as evergreen, those that do move on generally leave a small impression on the next generation of trends.

One timeless web design trend that has been around for quite a while and has imprinted its style onto many other popular trends is minimalism. But in more recent times we’ve seen the minimalist style evolve into a more extreme variant, something web designers are now calling ‘ultra-minimalism.’

Much like standard minimalism, to the untrained eye it might initially appear that all it takes to create an ultra-minimalist site is to strip away all of the non-essential elements and components, and merely replace them with whitespace. There’s much more to it than that. Deciding which elements to discard and keep is a skill in itself.

Every single pixel has to be carefully arranged to produce optimum results. Negative space must be understood and must be applied consistently. Having an expert knowledge of typography and a trained eye for selecting the perfect color scheme are just some of the other creative skills you will need to create an ultra-minimalist web layout successfully.

What does a typical ultra-minimal website look like? Well, they tend to be beautiful, take a look for yourself:

Cole Townsend

Sang Han

Tim Brack

Dennis Adelmann

Brian Nathan Hartwell

Velvet Hammer

Kerem Suer

Rob Wootten

We ain’t plastic

Ryan Paonessa

Jessica Caldwell

Buero

Socket Studios

Michiel de Graaf

Alessandro Scarpellini

Piet Oudolf

You might also like to learn about Dual-Toned Color Schemes in Web Design or about Long Scrolling in Web Design.