1. One night, I just went and deleted everything.

There’s that moment every designer knows – the hush of an almost-anxious one, once 70% of your layout has been wiped. That was me last night. Sitting in my Tampa apartment, the kind of evening mugginess when even the air seems to buffer. Pixel (my cat – not the Google kind) had parked herself on my tablet, while I stared at what was left of my app interface.

Clean. Breathe easier. But also … maybe too empty? … No, that’s the point, right? Minimalism. Or whatever version of it we’re supposed to get now.

I have been working in mobile app development in Tampa for nearly six years, and somewhere along the line ‘minimalism’ turned from an aesthetic into kind of therapy. Every designer I know is quietly fighting clutter, digital, mental, emotional … Deleting a gradient sometimes feels like deleting a thought you didn’t need.

2. The thing about “making it pop”

That day, a little earlier in the day, client during a Zoom call slipped in the ‘’can we make it pop more?” dreaded phrase. “Can we make it pop more?” A realist would smile at such illusions, or so I have been told.,, I smile politely but my soul rolls its eyes behind my back. Pop more. Really, it’s not something that can be made like a design balloon you inflate with energy.

Most of the time it’s more of what all of us understand can be there: more shades, colors, animations, gradients-something they can refer to and boast, “We paid for that.”

Yet the longer I’ve been at this, the more I think the real force of design is subtraction. Taking things away until only the useful remains. (Wait-didn’t somebody famous say that? Maybe. Still true.)

It’s when you have an app so easy someone doesn’t have to think about it working. That’s the win. Invisible work. The kind that leaves no fingerprint.

3. Tangent: The grocery store moment

There’s a grocery store not far from where I reside that boasts self-checkout machines seeming to have been designed in quite a rush. Their buttons are varied in size, the color contrast is poor, and the “start over” button is placed way too near to the “pay” button. Each time I use one, I can’t help but picture the designing team in some conference room exclaiming, “It’s fine. People will work it out.”

But people don’t want to have to figure things out. They want things to work.

That’s what minimalism does—it doesn’t brag, waving at you from the corner of the screen; it just works quietly.

Somewhere between the chaos of too many features and the sterile coldness of oversimplicity, there’s this sweet spot where design feels…human. Like it respects your time.

4. The lie of “more features”

In my last job, there was that eternal argument between marketing and design. Marketing was all in favor of features — the more the merrier: “Let’s add sharing options!” “Let’s gamify the to-do list!” “Let’s add a leaderboard!” We (the designers), on the other hand, were saying, for God’s sake, stop adding stuff nobody has asked for.

Let’s be honest — probably 90% of the people use 10% of the features of an app. The others are just kind of icons of good intentions. I remember a stat from Google (’23, I think?) that claimed nearly 70% of users delete an app within the first week because they’re confused by the interface or feel it’s too cluttered. That number haunts me.

Every unnecessary button is more friction. Every popup is a “later” that basically becomes a “never.”

5. The design that feels like breathingaa

Breathing comes to my mind very often when I design. Empty air isn’t vacuum; it’s oxygen.

When you allow a user interface to breathe – when you believe flashing arrows aren’t needed to instruct people what to do – something changes. Design stops shouting. It begins whispering.

User relaxation at the time they stop learning the application and start using the application. Maybe that is the real magic when design vanishes completely. Last time I showed my mom a prototype of an app I’ve been working on for months. She was scrolling through it and I hear her say ‘Feels easy’. That’s it. Two words. The best compliment I’ve ever gotten.

6. The ghost of early design habits

Among the old projects are those very first ones I created when just getting into design. Loud, that’s how I remember them: colors bickering with each other, buttons everywhere, stacks on stacks of overcompensating gradients.

Confidence, I once thought was maximalism. To put everything out meant to prove that one knew one’s craft. But now: Bravery is in simplicity. To delete something you worked so hard on takes lots of guts.

And okay, tangent — this reminds me of an ex who used to collect furniture he didn’t need “just in case.” His apartment looked like an IKEA showroom crashed into a yard sale. I used to tease him but now I catch myself hoarding old design files the same way. Minimalism, it turns out, isn’t natural. It’s learned.

7. The contradiction I can’t fix

Here’s what still sticks to me: minimalism can get pretentious. You remove too much, and all the sudden it’s not user-friendly but confusing again. Flat screens passed off as “intentional.”

So, yeah, contradiction. It helps people, but it can also alienate them. There’s no formula for “just enough.” You feel rather than measure it.

I delete a button, panic, bring it back, delete it the very next day. Messy. /That’s fine. Real design is messy.

8. Tangent: late-night metaphor nobody asked for

When I was a kid, I would draw houses on paper and then erase the lines until they barely showed. I liked the faintness, the idea that something could exist almost invisibly.

End of the input

Now that feels like good design to me — like a vague pencil line. There, but not insisting to be seen. Perhaps that’s why the minimalists keep on winning. Not because it is the latest craze but because we are all tired. Of notifications, of visual noise, of all the e clamor for our attention. Minimalism is little riot: it refuses to cry out.

9. What simplicity costs

Here’s the weird truth no one tells clients: good design is remarkably intricate to produce. A hundred things are tried throughout the design before ninety-nine of them are taken, and the white space is shuffled for hours on something nobody will ever see.

Editing a good film, I guess — only when it’s bad do people notice.

Still, when it works, you feel it. The app breathes, and you breathe. As a user, you do not even consider why it feels right in place — and that is the point.

10. The quiet win

It’s 1:17 a.m. now. Pixel’s out for the count, the city outside has dialed itself nearly all the way down to quiet, cutting through only with one guy revving a motorcycle like he’s in a movie. I’m looking at my design again — the stripped-down version that used to set me on edge. It’s just text, color, space. Nothing extra.

And for the first time tonight, I don’t want to add anything back.

Minimalism wins, not for style or trend but to remind us what matters. It’s not about the features, the polish, or even the aesthetics. It’s about breathing room.

To think. To use. To be not fighting for attention.

Wait–maybe I’m just tired. Or maybe that’s exactly what I mean. Either way, I’ll leave it here. The screen’s calm. The app looks done.

And that’s enough.