Minimal Universe

Minimal Universe collect posts from our favorite minimal-related blogs listed on the right.
  • House IJburg

    The most wonderful in a room is the light that comes through the window of the room. The sun never knew how great it was before a room was built – Louis Khan

    This beautiful quote is mentioned on Rocha Tombal’s website, the architects of this amazing House IJburg, located in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

    Ana Rocha and Michel Tombal are masters of light, which is something that any house in the rainy Netherlands is craving for, most of the year.

    Paradoxical to the closed façade (which I really love, such a bold statement!), the house really embraces natural light.

    Through the careful placement of windows and walls, each floor and room has its own light intensity: very light on the ground floor, slightly darker on the first and second floor, and again bathing in light on the top floor.

    Almost a shame to add furniture!











  • the creativity of constraints

    On this site, I embrace a 400-word limit (unless it doesn’t make sense). It forces me to be concise, to focus on smaller topics, to choose the important, to be creative.

    Yes: constraints force us to be creative.

    Often, constraints, limitations, are seen as a negative, but to me they’re a feature. They might restrict freedom and force sacrifices, sure, but they also force us to choose. And to work within and around the constraints.

    When we must work within limits, we have to figure out how to make those work. This forces us to think outside our normal mode of thinking, to think of new ways to make things work.

    Consider:

    • When we have a small home, we must find new ways of living within that small space, instead of being lazy and doing whatever we want with lots of space.
    • When we must use fewer words, we must choose them wisely, instead of spilling them out carelessly.
    • When we eat fewer calories, we must choose more nutritious and yet tasteful foods, to make them count.
    • When we have less storage space, we must choose only the most important things, and make do with less.
    • When we limit ourselves to four sentences per email, we must say the essential, creatively.

    I could go on all day, but that would be contrary to my point. What constraints can you place on yourself, and how can you work creatively with them?

  • Corona

    Our beloved Japanese design agency Nendo brings us yet another gem: a set of globes called Corona.

    Rather than the common blue and green, the Corona globes have white oceans and black land masses. Furthermore, the globes show country names, but no borders. The purpose of this simplification was to:

    …create a new kind of globe that would be more emotional, rather than simply presenting information.

    I love how the designers reduced the amount of information – even though some African countries seem to be missing…?

    The globes were designed for Japanese globe manufacturer Watanabe Kyogu.







  • why i deleted 1,000 Facebook friends

    Today I deleted 1,031 friends from Facebook. It was liberating.

    As I talked about before, having a ton of friends on social networks is a major pull on your attention, and results in superficial relationships anyway. I prefer deeper relationships when possible.

    Facebook hasn’t worked well for me as a social network in the past. I loved connecting with close friends and family, and old friends from high school. But as I added friends without any criteria, it became too much — a stream of people leaving updates, sending me “gifts”, inviting me to all kinds of things, leaving things for me on my “wall”. I couldn’t stand it, and rarely checked Facebook. Twitter became my social space.

    In the last month or two I’ve slowly been unfriending people on Facebook, a dozen or so at a time. It was a tedious process, so I did it in small chunks. But with more than 1,500 friends (at the peak), it would take all year to unfriend everyone.

    So today, with the help of a reader on Twitter, I found a faster method: go to Account, then “Edit friends” and click the “X” next to people’s names. There was still an annoying popup confirmation dialog box, but with my mouse hovering over the “X”, and a finger on the Enter key, I could do it quickly.

    It took me 36 minutes to delete more than 1,000 friends. My criteria: I only left actual, real-life friends and family, plus old friends from high school. I got down to 99.

    Yes, I could have just deleted my account and started from scratch. But it would have taken me much more than 36 minutes to re-friend the 99 close friends, family & old high school friends again.

    If you’re a reader or someone I know online, you didn’t make the cut. That doesn’t mean I don’t love you. It just means I had to find a more manageable way. I prefer communicating with you on Twitter, so feel free to @zen_habits me there if you want to send me a message. I prefer public messages over private DMs — it’s transparent and makes the most of the responses I type.

    I really do love my readers. It’s just that Facebook wasn’t the way for me to connect with you.

    Read more: How to Reclaim Your Attention

  • "We must strive to reach that simplicity that lies beyond sophistication."

    ““We must strive to reach that simplicity that lies beyond sophistication.””

    - John Gardner

  • Mash Creative Calendar

    East London / Essex based design studio Mash Creative designed an A1 calendar poster in a limited edition of 100. Okay … we kicked-off 2010 already almost 2.5 months ago, but it is never too late to put a nice calendar on your wall.

    These nice, typographic, minimalist calendar posters are lithographs printed in two colors on 170gsm Cyclus offset with a 60% cyan shiner to achieve an extra rich black. Each poster is hand numbered and signed by the designer.

    The calendar is available for purchase at Counter-Objects.






  • Lotta

    Minimalist design, beautiful form and color, comfortable feel, and a sense of fun that’s the new Lotta mobile phone. It sits firmly in your hand and casts a delicate, trapezoidal silhouette. A two-tone contrast plays on its bright surface and features a matte finish and polished texture.

    Ichiro Iwasaki has designed this new mobile phone for the Japanese company iida. He initially worked at the Sony Design Center, later moved to Italy.

    After having experiences at design studios in Milan, returned to Japan and established Iwasaki Design Studio in 1995. He received a number of awards including the design award of the Federal Republic of Germany, the iF design award, the red dot award and the G-mark special award.







  • Balloon lamp

    Kyouei Design have a number of ingenious yet simple ideas among their product range; the balloon lamp is one that really caught my eye. They’ve been on the market for a while, but time hasn’t ravaged their ability to impress.

    The lamp itself comes flat-packed and is merely made up from a standard balloon, a high-intensity, low energy LED bulb and a couple of lithium coin batteries. Once the the balloon is inflated you have a great temporary, wireless lighting solution that lasts for around 100 hours.





  • April Third



    April Third



  • OLA folding table

    I love small space solutions, and when you live in a small apartment without a dining room. The OLA folding table looks like it can double up as a desk or dining table in just a few seconds of set-up, with barely any effort.

    Designed by AKKA, the table is not only functional, but when put away, it actually looks like an interesting piece of home decor.

    AKKA is a pleas­ant design-studio started by Peter Danielson and Oscar Ternbom and is located in Göte­borg, Swe­den. They do indus­trial design, fur­ni­ture, illus­tra­tion and graphic design.









  • stop making it complicated

    Now that I’ve learned to look at things with the lens of simplicity, I can see others making mistakes I’ve made in the past.

    I want to gently say to them — and to my past self — “Stop making things so complicated!”

    I’m not going to criticize how other people do things in this post, but rather talk about things I did wrong in the past.

    The biggest problem came when starting a new endeavor — starting running, trying to get organized or productive, starting blogging, getting out of debt, even the act of simplifying.

    I’d always make things so complicated — looking back on it, I either want to cringe or laugh. And yet, I know that life is a learning process, and those early mistakes helped me to get to where I am. Even now, I make tons of mistakes, learning as I go.

    Example 1: I wanted to be more productive, so I learned GTD (Getting Things Done, an excellent book by David Allen). I bought tools that other GTDers recommended, set up a series of lists, tried out a couple dozen different software (and paper) approaches to lists. Every GTDer knows this problem. GTD, and many other productivity systems, can end up being complicated.

    Today, my advice to my former self is: stop making it complicated. Productivity, such as I care about it today, is simple. You pick the most important thing you want to do today, clear distractions, and start on it. You don’t even need a list, though having a list for remembering what else needs to be done later is fine. Have one list, but don’t fiddle with it. Just pick one thing, and start working.

    Example 2: When I wanted to get out of debt, I tried various financial software, I made spreadsheets, I made schedules for payments, I tracked everything, and so on. It was complicated, believe me.

    Now I know it’s simple. First, stop the unnecessary spending (I know, easier said than done, but once you learn to recognize it and stop your impulse urges, it’s not complicated). Second, put everything you can to one debt at a time (first creating an emergency fund of at least $500), pay off that one debt, then pay off the next.

    Example 3: When I started blogging in January 2007, I looked at dozens of different blogging platforms/software, themes, ad platforms, ebooks, articles on every possible blogging topic. This is natural, as I was just learning the field.

    But today, I know it’s simple: you pick a topic, and write. Then hit publish. Share your stuff via Twitter or Facebook if you like, but don’t worry so much about that. Just write interesting and/or useful stuff, and people will find you eventually. Just write, and publish.

    When you start something new, sure, there’s a learning process. But also realize that while the learning is good, the doing doesn’t have to be complicated at all. Find the simplest way to do things, and just start doing it. You’ll learn by doing.

  • What Apple Sells...

    Apple has never really been in the business of selling product. What Apple really sells is an experience.

    What Apple sells begins before you even walk in the door…

    It begins before you take out your credit card…

    It continues when you get back home…

    To when you start it up…

    My point being that, any company can sell you a product. Very few take the time and attention to detail that it takes to sell you an experience. If you really want to know what makes Apple so successful where others struggle, look at what they sell.

  • Tully Hansen

    Tully Hansen:

    Shout out to Tully, who was the 4000th follower of Minimal Mac on Tumblr. His reward: Sending him some Sweet Schwag™. Not to worry though, the schwag will be even sweeter for number 5000.

  • How-To: Use Time Machine Over a Network

    How-To: Use Time Machine Over a Network :

    I love Time Machine for its simplicity and the fact that it’s free. Apple did the right thing in creating a backup utility that was integrated into the OS and was actually useful. Anyone who has fought with Windows Backup can tell you, this has been needed for a long time. Apple created a beautiful backup utility and then made money on hardware that seamlessly works with it. For the home user, nothing could be more simple.

    Good quick tutorial on how to get Time Machine backing up to a network volume without laying out the cash for a Time Capsule.

  • iPad Aesthetics

    iPad Aesthetics:

    But as someone who prefers tidiness and iPhone screen real estate, I think the iPad interface is a step in the right direction

    Me too. Chris makes a good simple argument (with pictures) to make the case.

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