Recently, solar steam and vapor generation has attracted attention as a promising prospect in desalination, sterilization and chemical purification. Tremendous progress has been achieved in absorber designs and thermal management. However, in all the previous designs, because of the minimized optical loss and heat conduction loss, losses related to convection and conduction start to dominate. Therefore, it becomes critical to simultaneously minimize the losses related to radiation, convection and conduction simultaneously in order to achieve optimum solar steam performance and enable widespread applications.