Care to elaborate more about "minimal" art style? Because anime does have it's visual noise too. It's stylized, but it's there nonetheless. I wouldn't call comics minimalistic either. Depends on subject matter and particular look you are going for. According to that, you might want to draw inspiration from illustration…
Lately I have been thinking about how to work more effectively on 3D art, and how to make everything look more... well consistent... What the Hawken guy did is of course cool too, e.g. reusing bits and pieces all over the place... but ultimatly you are still dealing with a lot of small details. In general I feel all that…
Good design is good design. Whether it's a mutant-zombie-robot-machine gun, or a character for a children's book. All the same principles apply, and "greeble" fits into a big no-no, which is distracting noise. Pixar and feature animation in general is a great resource to study for the "simpler" kind of stuff (even though…