Minimalissimo

As for most things in life, I got involved with Minimalissimo thanks to human connections. Back in 2015, Carl, Minimalissimo Mega CEO and overall nice guy approached my friend Ale to rebrand Minimalissimo.

You can read more about the redesign here if you’re curious. Anyway, Ale designed a new logo and logotype, changed the font (goodbye serif 😢) and the new Mimo was born. After the new identity came the new website. Not the one I co-designed and coded. I’m talking about the old new website.

I don’t remember what I was doing at the time, I was probably busy with some other client website and couldn’t help Ale with that project. That’s why Six got involved and they designed and coded the new site.

Fast forward a couple of years. Carl got in touch with me on Twitter to see if I was interested to work on the new version of the site. I obviously said yes. I had no idea what I was getting into at the time ahah.

That’s a lot of stuff

Minimalissimo has been around for quite some time. And as you can imagine, every site more than a couple of years old must have a ton of content. Especially if it’s an image heavy site. That was exactly the case with Mimo. There were a ton of images on the server. And if you know anything about how WordPress works (the site runs on WordPress), you know that WP is more than happy to take your already numerous uploads and make countless crops if you’re not careful.

That’s what happened to Mimo during the years. All the different themes used generated an insane amount of images, most of which were not even used by the current site. The cleanup process took a lot of time. Ask Carl if you don’t believe me.

In addition to that, there were other problems on both the site and the server but I'll not go into details because those problems are now part of the oast and were not that interesting to begin with.

The new design

The idea was not to make a full redesign but rather to improve on top of the existing design. Well we ended up changing quite a lot.

The new site has way more whitespace and less text. Images are bigger and we switched the previous 3 columns system in favor to a 2 columns one. Two columns are kept almost everywhere on the site. A ton of less js, more structured and simple code overall.

The main 8 categories have been restructured (both on the front and backend) and have more importance in the homepage.

Since we were putting our hands on the site we took the opportunity to implement a couple of new things one of which is the new dark theme you saw above. That’s a tiny little thing but makes the site a bit unique.