Minimalissimo, R.I.P.
I discovered Minimalissimo 15 years ago, literally on the day they started publishing. It became part of my RSS reader. It found a home in a folder called “The good stuff,” which had many such websites and blogs. These were aesthetics-oriented online destinations. Many of these sites are gone — becoming irrelevant with age. Others migrated to Instagram. Yesterday, Minimalissimo announced that they too will stop publishing.
“The site is in archival mode,” the founders wrote on the website. “The plan is to keep it up and preserve all the content that was posted throughout the years, but we’re not going to update it further.” It is a wonderful repository of “the finest examples of minimal architecture, art, interior, furniture, lighting and product design.” The site features 4,000 projects and more than 30,000 images.
They will continue to publish their monthly newsletter. Something they wrote in the most recent issue made me pause and wonder about the general direction of “writing” and “websites.”
As you might have noticed, the web is going through quite the odd phase lately. More and more sites are shutting down — even very old, established ones — and search is getting progressively worse. There was a time, back in the late 2010s, when sites like Minimalissimo were playing an important role in the web ecosystem and thousands of people were visiting the site daily. Over time though, that audience slowly drifted away. Consumption shifted, from websites to social media. We followed the flow and did our best to adapt to an evolving landscape while trying to remain true to our values.
A note on Carl Barenbrug’s blog accurately points out the web’s present reality.
By 2019, the volume of design blogs and magazines on the web was huge. Many began to look the same and we began to notice so much recycled content. Curation was becoming increasingly challenging if we wanted to maintain distinctiveness. On top of this, social media was very quickly eating away at indie websites like a plague. Our readership was declining year after year, and the pressures of pumping more energy into social media platforms to be noticed and relevant was a huge time sink. And it stunk. Much like the algorithms we’d all have to navigate in the years that followed. We were fighting a losing battle.
Reading between the lines, they’re saying distribution now outweighs creation itself. This isn’t surprising.
Minimalissimo, you will be missed.
October 16, 2024. San Francisco
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Pretty much every week I find a link in my miles long, saved site list that no longer work. I collect wrist watches and was collecting in the when I had to go the library and see if I could find old advertisements and articles about particular watches.
My favorite watch ever is a lowly 50’s number made by Nivada Grenchen, a company that folded during the ‘quartz crisis’ of the early 80’s and have recently been revived. The model is the Antarctic. 34mm of stainless case and a round dial dotted with deco fan indices and dauphine hands. and employed the first automatic movement from ETA and created anti-magnetic properties necessary to keep time at the poles. It had a connection to Admiral Byrd and being born in 1958, The International Geophysical Year, when countries were encouraged to explore uncharted parts of the planet, I thought it was cool as a kid. I always liked exploration history and collected Antarctic exploration books and ephemera as well.
One of my favorite collectors built a personal website chock a block with information on tons of watches he’d collected as well as others he wanted or appreciated and had amassed photos, advertisements, old catalogs, and on rare occasions specifications and archive papers from other brands that had not survived the quartz boom. All this was posted as reference for others, and was mostly word of mouth to start but I used to do screen shots of pages for my own watch collection archives. All of it just disappeared. Another vault of good watch stuff was lost when the owner passed away but revived by enthusiasts and family thankfully. It was a depository for mechanical watch movement specifications and photos that is a precious for watch folks.
They used to say once you post something online, it’s out there forever. I no longer believe that. Turns out things just disappear and are lost forever.
Having lost access to so much of my own work at Red Herring, Business 2.0, and later at GigaOM, I agree with that comment. And as a result, now I keep a copy for everything on my website, which I pay for, and also keep a copy, incase something goes wrong.