April 2023
My web design curation project Minimal Gallery is turning 10 this year. To celebrate, I wanted to share how it all started, new features, some numbers and what’s planned.
History
I’ve been curating Minimal Gallery (almost) daily since 2013. It recently crossed 2,000 featured websites and 100k views/40k unique last month.
It’s crazy to think that it started as a personal collection of inspiration for my client projects. I was saving bookmarks of my favourite websites for inspiration and reference, but it got so so much that I wanted to find a better solution for organizing them, ideally with preview images and tagging features. A simple way to do so was to create a simple tumblr blog for myself and upload a selection of my bookmarks, adding screenshots to each of them. After a few weeks I noticed people started following it, so I started working on a custom design and “simply” never stopped curating it.
It’s amazing how much impact an unpaid side project can have on your life. I’ve met some folks through it that I now call my friends, people who’ve been following since day one, and some who found and applied for jobs. I’ve even had people who started following when they first became interested in design, then went on to study, got their first job and years later submitted their first site to the collection.
Monetization
I’m trying to find a good balance that provides value to visitors and sponsors alike so still experimenting here. Trust should always be prioritised over ads or promoting big names. I rejected many advertising opportunities over the years and will continue doing so to keep up the level of curation.
I’m currently exploring a few ways to monetize:
Job board: Not your typical embedded board with thousands of jobs, but instead hand-picked companies and positions that I support, with the same quality as the rest of the project.
Submission fee: Submitting websites will stay free. I don’t want to take the opportunity away from people who can’t pay. But since beginning of the year, you pay $25 to submit if it’s a theme, domain or typeface for sale. This seams to be a fair solution.
Sponsors: I welcome Studio Lenzing as the first sponsor ever. I love their work and am happy that they decided to support this project. Going forward, I'm planning to have ~3 sponsors at a time, randomly showing one of the three when visiting the site.
For transparency, this has been the revenue so far:
February: $50
March: $125
April: $250
...
Update September: $800
Update October: $1050
(Imagine an amazing hockey stick curve diagram here)
Other updates & future plans
Domains: People who visit the site are often at the earliest stages of a project. And as a domain addict myself, I thought it could be fun to list some high quality domains. Theoretically the commissions for this should also be another source of income, but so far I haven't received any.
Built with: On the subpage of each website, you can now see what the site was built with. Currently detecting Webflow, Framer, Shopify...
Mobile view: A way to switch between desktop and mobile screenhots. Coming soon.
Templates: With the rise of no-code tools like Framer, it could make sense to curate the best templates somewhere. Not sure if this should be a separate website.
All these things should be seen as experiments. I will continue to curate the collection on an almost-daily basis and hopefully grow the audience even more. If you have any requests (anything, really), reach out and let me know.
Thanks
Thanks to everyone who's been submitting websites, spreading the word or following for a long time. And special thanks to Manuel Moreale, who was running a similar project and was kind enough to gift me the domain (thegallery.io) when it was shut down.