Helm: A Browser Concept

There is a big wave in ‘minimalist’ – I refuse to use the word ‘flat’ – design. I use quotes here because a lot of these designs tend to be only simple in aesthetics, instead of having a simplified feature set. It’s a fashionable thing to take something, deprive it of button shapes, styles and gradients and call it ‘minimal’.

Last year I thought of an idea for a browser that would be minimalist. Not necessarily in an aesthetic sense; I’d just like a browser that gets out of the way. Like the new (and unloved) design for Quicktime X introduced in Snow Leopard, I’d love to see a browser focusing solely on content, and generally offer a more visual approach to browsing the internet. ( – Yes, I mocked up a web browser again. I like doing it!)

Thus, the idea for ‘Helm’ was born. I designed this over a year ago and feel like there’s no chance it’ll ever become more than a set of Photoshop files, so I’m sharing my thought experiment here.

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