All Blogs Are Minimalist

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One feature that made Medium popular is the minimalist design of its blogs. They emphasize text and images and have no blogrolls, widgets, tag clouds, or other distracting elements.

It was a unique feature in the days of the desktop web when Medium came out.

A post of a Blogger blog in Chrome on a Pixel 2 XL phone
A post of my blog in Chrome on my Pixel 2 XL phone.

Now the web is mobile-first and all responsive websites have a similar minimalist design on the smartphone and tablet screens the majority of readers use. They hide most of the design complexity behind a hamburger menu with links to other pages. If you open a post, the text and images dominate the page area.

Just like Medium.

For example, my Blogger blog has a responsive template that works the same way. Visit it on your phone. There are a few links at the top of the page and a handful of post recommendations at the bottom. These minor elements are hardly distracting. WordPress blogs and most other responsive websites do the same.

The mobile revolution pushed these minimalist site designs and made them ubiquitous.

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