In your case, there is neither a grid nor a measure that makes the placement of elements on the page make sense. Text is haphazard. The "contents" of each section are stuffed into an inexplicable jQuery scroller. Nav elements are 18px and subheds are 14px; there is minimal contrast between elements. This probably wouldn't cut it as a blog template.

I like the restraint with color though. Color is one place where good-simple is easier than good-complex.

Department websites at universities are also probably not a good benchmark for your work. They tend to be utilitarian. Design is a secondary concern.

[1]: http://www.loup-vaillant.fr

I also don't like the fake scrollbar and the arbitrarily small content window that wastes half of my window height--I've got a large screen, I shouldn't have to look at your content through a peephole.

I personally like the muted colors and lack of gradient/round corners/drop shadows everywhere but I can see it being criticized as "too plain". Minimalist doesn't == good design, necessarily.

Minimalist is very bare; the content has to stand strongly on it's own.

Simplistic designs don't have to be minimalist - just simple. So fewer colours, less complexity and so on.

People generally (in my experience anyway) prefer simple to minimalist.

I am saying this because I actually over heard the management say that it isn't good for "business" if people thought x about the institute at the conference my mother forced me to attended, which is just... sad.

It isn't that their education quality is less (same texts; good enough teachers will give you the required amount of education. The rest is up to you). It's just that it is less likely to find free thinkers over there who are willing to speak out. If there are smart people on the faculty (there must be) they choose their battles carefully and in this case they would tow the managements line. If this was TIFR or IISc (I say this out of first hand experience) then it would have been fine, because they encourage such stuff and they would be delighted to find someone on the tail end of the curve.

Should I give you some advice as someone who has been through this?

Give them what they want.

Your professors are wise and follow their lead over here. Building a website is something trivial in the longer run and you have to pick your battles wisely. Spend the same energy in mastering this as it's obvious that you have a talent at work over here. Remember fighting with idiots tends to make you an idiot.

So, tread softly because you tread on your dreams.

Anyway, take care.

The content frame in the middle has a scrollbar but no border, which is off-putting since it's not standard. It's also not the full height of the browser, which is useless; don't make me scroll more than I have to. For large pages, that the gray box is a scrollbar is not obvious.

There is no indication that clicking faculty opens a new page. I thought something went wrong the first time I clicked it.

The "association.SOMETHING" message at the top is a nice touch, but since it's right justified it moves when you click a new page. The word "association" should not move -- it's distracting.

The text in the paragraphs is too small for no reason, especially on your "home" page.

I really like how the current page's link is indented and how the links move to the right when you mouse over them. That's a nice touch and intuitive. I love the lack of color. The page is otherwise very easy to read and navigate.

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2531-great-proportions-melt-a...

There are a few other basic things that could be changed to make the site much more usable. As someone else said, don't break the back button. Ditch the scrolly boxes. You don't need them and they're unintuitive. Differentiate the links on the page from the rest of the text. Right now the navigation links are the same grey as the rest of the content. You have some red text mixed in there and it looks clickable, but it isn't.

You're off to a good start, it just needs some refinement.

When something is minimal it's not very useful. It's basically saying "I don't want to look too complex".

On the other hand when something is simple it's because there's and underlying understanding of complexity.

You can read what Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, thinks about this (http://designthinking.ideo.com/?p=404).

The work of a designer should be therefore to understand complexity and make it simple.In order to make it simple, the designer should ultimately be the one who decides what to add and what to leave out.

I really suggest this video by Joel Spolsky during BoS 2009 http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/08/19.html

Most design clients want art. They want something that is uniquely theirs; they want a combination of colors and patterns and graphics that are unmistakably unique. The designer's job is to reconcile art with function. What you built is all function, and no art.

(But I like it.)

(If you haven't heard of CloudApp: http://getcloudapp.com)

http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/design-inspiration/

Despite her craziness, Ann Coulter has a fairly nice minimalist website (well, it looks minimalist). Although that quotations thing off to the side kinda ruins it, AFAIK it was recently added (I don't remember seeing it during to school year, when I last visited), so you might check the wayback machine.

But don't validate your code on the W3C validator and be done with it. If you have to run the validator at all - and I haven't in years - take the validation errors as suggestions and not as gospel.

If it fails that test, then it'll fail more thorough tests. Fail and fail early.

We tried to make things really simple in our site. Goal: content is king. The rest, should fade away from user's attention.

Short of what Jeff Bezos is trying with the Kindle reading experience.