Minimalist Design: Fantasy or Reality?

A friend of mine recently sent me a link for 25 Beautiful, Minimalistic Website Designs featured on vandelaydesign.com. I looked them over, admiring the clean lines, large chunks of restful white space and sparse text. I began to think about how some of my own site designs had started out in the minimalist realm (the client requested a "clean and uncluttered" look) but slowly devolved into a design in which most of the site's content (or at least a call-out for it) ended up on the home page. But this post isn't about how to keep a site's home page from becoming the design equivalent of Times Square; you can read more about that subject here and here.

What I noticed about the list of 25 minimalist designs is that 21 of the them are websites for individuals or design firms in which the designer is the client. Does this fact disqualify them from being included in a list of beautifully designed sites? No. But working with a client who isn't yourself can prove to be a bit more challenging when it comes to retaining minimalist design values.

To bring this list a little more into the realm of reality, I would have compiled a gallery of sites that managed to retain some of their original elegance in spite of going through the long and often unpredictable process of site development, design and client feedback.