Successfully pulling off the minimalist design

What kind of site is it? Though designers like to think visitors will take notice of their hard work, often they just care about some specific information and just want it to be easy to find and easy to read. So just make sure the design accommodates the visitor's interest before your own. Google's page layout are very simple and uninspiring, but drive a lot of traffic due to useful content and tools. Most of its pages are actually a fugly in my opinion, but I don't use their pages for their design, I'm there for their usefulness.

Research Swiss design.

http://www.amazon.com/Swiss-Graphic-Design-International-1920-1965/dp/0300106769 --haven't read it, but looks good

The trick is good typography. If you have that then you don't need any other (or very few) elements.

My site is quite minimal in the fact its basically a picture with some text below but it still remains interesting. Well i think its does anyway

You can still use lines, just make them elegant and less old school boxy.

By that I mean:

1 single pixel height
60% width instead of 100%, always centered
A color that contrasts nicely with background, but not too stark - i.e. a soft light gray on black as opposed to white or yellow on black.
Consider adding 40-60% transparency to certain block, box or border elements - "subtle fade".

Or use a subtle graphic as a horizontal rule, something fancier than just a straight line, following same basic rules as above except the height can obviously be a bit taller.

What I'm getting at is you can be minimalistic and elegant at the same time.

-jim

I know this is overkill, but I love the site (and use it for the actual content):

http://zenhabits.net/

This is a sister site that can't go any further:

http://mnmlist.com/

Now that's minimalism!

I'm glad you linked both sites, H00513R.

The first is, to me, more pleasant to the eye compared to the second, and if you look carefully nearly all of the horizontal rules follow almost exactly the suggestions I posed in my last response. The second site, as minimal as it could be, looks unfinished. Even though both are easy to navigate and score highly on usability. A little touch of elegance goes a long way to bringing users back with a smile. Even Wikipedia and boring web accessible resource logs for user analytics have a few touches of elegance to not only make the data easier to read and understand, but allow the site to maintain its look and feel throughout. Google, as mentioned earlier, is minimalist but also - think about it - brand recognizable. The concept is so simple, it's brilliant.

I know this stuff seems unimportant to some, but simple design concerns like these often are equal to development concerns, even on minimalist sites, I think.

-jim