As a graphic designer, our job and overall goal is to communicate clear and succinct ideas and messages to a specific audience. When designing for the web, we want strong ideas to get the attention of the user, so that they return regularly and consistently spend more time on the site. We do this in hopes of creating a “Sticky” site, where ideas are absorbed and then spread outward, in hopes of making the site successful. One of the key elements in making a site “Sticky,” is to keep ideas simple and compact. A clear idea focuses on the core of your message, removes any superfluous information, making the message memorable and allowing it to stick with your audience.

In the post How To Design A Sticky Site: Stickiness Part I by Steven Bradley, he shares how to convey simple ideas in web design in order to achieve stickiness:

… The first thing is to understand the core idea or goal of the site. Why does the site exist? What’s its purpose? What is it trying to do? These are questions you should be asking before beginning any design.

We can carry the idea of finding the core to each page of the site as well. What goal does any given page have? How can we design the page to push people toward that goal.

Generally a site and even a page will have more than a singular goal. Your site might exist to make a sale, generate a lead, convert a visitor to subscriber and so on. Still it should have a primary idea or message to communicate.

Think of a tagline? Isn’t your tagline meant to simply and succinctly sum up what your site and business is about? Isn’t a tagline the core idea behind your site.

When someone lands on any page of your site they should be able to understand what the site is about instantly. This is usually done through a combination of the site name, the company logo, the tagline. On the single page it would also include the main heading. Consider the idea of simplicity in all of these.

We might also add in the idea of across a site. A unified design is one where everything is working together to communicate the same central message. When all your design elements agree they create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. They help to place the focus on what’s most important.

Stripping away the unessential might also lead us toward minimalism. I don’t think the idea of simplicity means we should only create minimalist designs, but it does imply that any design we create should be effective when we strip away the eye candy and it does imply that no matter what style, your design should only include what’s necessary to communicate your message.

“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” -Antoine de Saint-Exupery

When there’s nothing left to take away you’re left with the core.