The alarm goes off fast
Since building this site loud on purpose (the reasons are in Less is a bore), I've noticed a pattern. When I share it with people who don't design, the reactions are about the thing itself: the planets, the black hole, "wait, how did you do that?" When I share it with designers, the first reaction is often about the category: "it's a lot."
Both are honest. They're just measuring different things. One group is asking "is this interesting?" The other is asking "is this correct?" And for about fifteen years, "correct" on the web has looked like a white page, a big headline, three feature cards and a lot of breathing room.
Familiar feels like good
Psychologists have a name for part of this. In 1968 Robert Zajonc showed that people tend to like things more simply because they've seen them before, even shapes and words that mean nothing to them. It's called the mere-exposure effect. Later research on "processing fluency" points the same way: what's easy for our brains to take in, we tend to judge as better, truer and more beautiful.
Now picture a designer's week: dozens of landing pages, component libraries, template marketplaces, galleries of the same clean layouts. That's a lot of exposure to one style. It's no surprise that style starts to feel like the definition of good, and anything else feels like friction. The alarm isn't a considered judgment. It's familiarity doing its job.
Every field defends its paradigm
The historian Thomas Kuhn described something similar in science. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), he argued that most scientists work inside a shared framework, a paradigm, and results that don't fit it get treated as errors first. The people most fluent in the paradigm are, understandably, the slowest to see past it. That's not a character flaw. Expertise is exactly that: a trained sense of what "normal" looks like.
Design has paradigms too. Minimal SaaS is one. It earned its place (it's clear, it's fast, it works on phones), and a designer who's great at it has good reasons to trust it. But a paradigm also tells you what to ignore.
The Eiffel Tower is the classic case. In 1887, while it was still being built, a group of prominent Parisian artists and writers published a protest calling it useless and monstrous. Guy de Maupassant was among them, and there's a story (probably a legend) that he later ate lunch in the tower's restaurant because it was the only place in Paris he couldn't see it. The tower didn't get quieter. People's eyes changed.
Advanced, but acceptable
None of this means "ignore designers." The industrial designer Raymond Loewy had a rule he called MAYA: most advanced, yet acceptable. People want something new, he said, but only up to the point where it stops feeling familiar. Push past that, and they reject it no matter how good it is.
That's the real job on a maximalist site: go as far as you can while keeping one foot in what people already know how to use. On this site, that foot is the boring stuff done right: a nav where you expect it, headlines that say what the page is, a contact form that's always one click away, and an "Engines on" switch right in the nav that stills the whole site for anyone who wants less.
A flinch or a flaw?
When someone says "it's too much," I sort it into one of two piles:
- A flinch is about the category: "it's a lot," "it's busy," "not my style." It tells you the site stands out from the paradigm. That's information, but it isn't a bug report.
- A flaw is about getting something done: "I couldn't find your work," "it lagged on my phone," "the motion made me dizzy." That's a real problem, no matter who says it or how they feel about maximalism.
Designers give both kinds, and their flaw reports are some of the best you'll get, because they know exactly where to look. The flinches are the part to weigh lightly.
Whose opinion runs the site
The last filter is simple: could this person hire me? A portfolio is for the people who'll trust you with their project: studios, businesses, founders with a big idea. Their reaction decides whether the site works. A peer's gut reaction is interesting. A prospect's is the test.
And there's one reaction that settles most arguments: what people remember an hour later. If a designer calls the site too much but still remembers the black hole in the footer, the site did its job. Nobody walks away from a template remembering the third feature card.
In practice
- Ask what "too much" means. Hard to use, or just unfamiliar? The follow-up question sorts flinches from flaws in one sentence.
- Fix every flaw, from anyone. Usability isn't a matter of taste.
- Weigh feedback by audience. Prospects first, peers second.
- Keep one foot in the familiar. Loud design, predictable navigation.
- Watch what sticks. Memorable beats correct when the job is to be remembered.
The alarm going off isn't proof the site is wrong. Sometimes it just means the site is new.