13 ms·
Brutalist Websites
- Kinnard 11y agohttp://brutalistwebsites.com/news.ycombinator.com/ http://brutalistwebsites.com/news.ycombinator.com/ . . . not to mention in his own dialect of lisp — arc: http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html
- rtpg 11y agoWhat's the pitch for brutalism? At least for buildings I've seen, they have all seemed to fail on a usability and aesthetic side. Is there something appealing to building a dystopian building?
- evanb 11y ago99 PI did a good piece on brutalism. http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/hard-to-love-a-brute/ http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/hard-to-love-a-brute/
- nickpsecurity 11y agoI still don't get it in terms of websites even though I get the concrete philosophy. What's linked in OP is a hodgepodge of random crap that doesn't feature concrete architecture's strengths in any consistent way.
- rhizome 11y agoOP link is not a coherent statement of anything.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoExactly and with more brevity.
- vlehto 11y ago"The rebar can rust, and the rust can cause the concrete to fracture." The rebar will only rust if the concrete PH is neutralized. (Cement is pretty strong base.) This neutralization happens when the concrete slowly reacts with oxygen. Typically reinforced concrete has safe lifespan of about 70 years, while unreinforced concrete only reaches its max strength around 90 years. Typically lifespan and hardening are both slowed down if the concrete is sealed from water. (By paint or preferably with some external cladding and some passive ventilation between cladding and concrete.) Reinforced concrete is shit if you consider only strenght/weight. It's kinda OK if you take into account price. But if you need good fire safety, it's bloody brilliant stuff. So for big buildings, staircases, elevator shafts and underground spaces it's good choice.
- wycx 11y agoSomething I recently learned of is basalt fiber rebar. It won't rust, but I guess on a long enough time frame it will devitrify. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basalt_fiber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basalt_fiber
- vlehto 11y agoThanks for the info, I learned something. The trick usually in reinforcing is that you need to find two materials that have relatively equal heat expansion coefficient, while the fiber needs to be lot stiffer than the matrix. Luckily concrete is quite "springy" compared to most metals and ceramics. In composite structures the ultimate strength of the fiber is often not the limiting factor. The limit is how large share of the load is carried by the reinforcement, which is proportionate to the ratio of Young's moduli of the matrix and the fiber (+ fiber length, average direction and volumetric proportion). Steel has almost same expansion coefficient as concrete. Basalt is significantly lower. So it would probably best suit reinforcing in stable climates or used as relatively short fibers. You would not want hundreds of meters long basalt fiber rope to be pretensioned inside concrete bridge, as the rope might crumble the surrounding concrete at hot weather.
- sgw928 11y agoIt reflects the outsized influence Le Corbusier had in the architecture circle. Many people imitated him and built piles of concrete mostly for government and college projects.
- pippy 11y agoI'll have to agree it's not a good fit. Seemly the only advantage brutalism has is ease of construction. Given that a site, just like a building, usability and aesthetics will pay off in the long run.
- smitherfield 11y agoI'm in Boston, pretty much the epicenter. I can't think of many redeeming qualities. My sense of the genre is that it was an attempt to copy Eastern Bloc architecture by architects who were warmly disposed to the Eastern Bloc, and had either disabused themselves or wanted to disabuse us of bourgeois notions of aesthetics and good taste. IMO, although it has definitely improved over the last 40-50 years, architecture peaked aesthetically circa the turn of the 20th century (Art Nouveau[0], Gaudí). [0] https://www.google.com/search?q=art+nouveau+architecture&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=art+nouveau+architecture&tbm...
- meddlepal 11y agoAlso Bostonian here. I think the other problem with Brutalism in urban contexts is that is very non-contextual and very imposing structurally. It really announces itself much to the detriment of everything around it. On the other hand I find Brutalism architecture that sits in contrast to wide open fields or a hillside to work very well.
- trentmb 11y ago> I can't think of many redeeming qualities. I find it clean, non-distracting, 'sterile'- I end up focusing more on the people around me than the buildings towering over me.
- rspeer 11y agoOur upside-down city hall and the plaza wasteland around it are described as brutalist, and yet I would not call City Hall "non-distracting" or the plaza "clean".
- smitherfield 11y agoI think a lot of people ITT may be confusing Brutalism and modernist architecture in general. "Clean," "unobtrusive" and so on are not adjectives I'd use to describe it (Brutalist architecture).
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
- swah 11y agoThere was some discussion on this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10317062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10317062 I liked some of those buildings, but I'm not sure why. Probably just the loneliness feeling.
- ekianjo 11y agoHacker news part of that list, really?
- kennywinker 11y agoHN and reddit are two of the first things I thought of after I saw the first few examples. If brutalism is favouring functionality over "design", then they are some of the most popular examples I know of.
- userbinator 11y agoI don't browse Reddit unless I was linked there, so I might not have seen all it has to offer, but my impression is that it's far more "fluffy" than HN.
- creshal 11y agoReddit's default theme is more or less as spartan as HN, it just uses more JS for interactivity. However, each sub can configure their own theme, which tends to lead to geocities syndrome. (If you're registered, you can disable themes, presumably for that reason.)
- chezhead 11y agoJust showed some of these to a generally non-tech-savy friend who said he didn't like them because they looked "too 90s." Personally I love them because they load fast, are easy to read, and don't require a knowledge of a bunch of different frameworks to write.
- jd3 11y agoI have been fighting for years to get people used to "90s aesthetics." Then again, I think (bitmap) aliased fonts, bitmap gif patterns, classic bitmap icons (susan kare, early KDE, IRIX, BeOS, Plan9, Mac OS 9, etc.), Netscape, CDE etc. were all incredibly beautiful. I have railed against complexity since as early as I can remember. It's even more important for web design. Give me simple HTML with a touch of css, and javascript only if it's absolutely necessary. I can think of hardly any websites that I would consider "beautiful" these days for exactly this reason. http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://www.webdirections.org/blog/the-website-obesity-crisis/ http://www.webdirections.org/blog/the-website-obesity-crisis... PS: I'm not sure I would classify these sites as brutalist; perhaps 'utilitarian' or 'functional' would be better descriptors.
- chezhead 11y agoIf youth trends are any indication, the 90s are officially a "retro" aesthetic now for those of us that spend too much time on tumblr, 4chan, and all that. While it all isn't classified as "vaporwave", the entire 'windows 95'/purple-pink pastels/tron-grid/gifs is seeping into media. I can pull up some examples if anyone's interested. A lot of websites we're making nowadays are HTML/CSS with a touch of javascript out of necessity since nobody wants to just use some wordpress template or have it look like every other AngularJS webapp. It might just be the particular sort of sites I stumble upon or my strict adblocking though. But I'm not sure it could ever be fully 'mainstream' since there's enough people (particularly older) that need big buttons and familiar design to browse the web. But for smaller sites that cater to generally younger people, it could take this direction. Only time will tell! PS: I agree that it really isn't brutalist, but there really should be a better word to describe this sort of aesthetic.
- 11y ago
- tommynicholas 11y agoCould I get https://blankslate.io https://blankslate.io on here? Is it brutalist enough?
- madeofpalk 11y agoIt appears you need to switch the font to either Courier or Times New Roman before you could get on the list.
- tommynicholas 11y agoHmmm... Not sure it's worth it
- sehr 11y agoThat looks pretty cool, little bug: modals are halfway off the screen to the left on mobile safari, also desktop key combinations are still being shown in the save flow!
- tommynicholas 11y agoThanks! I'll take a peak
- ChrisGranger 11y agoTo publish as a blog, just as [have? use?] a #title at the top and then "publish" on the view-note screen
- tommynicholas 11y agoGood catch - sloppy proofreading by me. Thanks!
- sawyerjhood 11y agoSome of these sites are so refreshing. I'm starting to get tired of seeing the same "minimalistic" landing pages for every website I go to. This reminds me of a time when the web was younger.
- mchahn 11y ago> I'm starting to get tired of seeing the same "minimalistic" landing pages I can't take enough minimalism. I hate complex websites from 10 years ago. I do have a little problem with all the new sites that make you scroll down forever but I'll take that over a site with a hundred graphics on the front page.
- anexprogrammer 11y agoI despise the trend for content minimalism. Where once there was a headline and sub, there's often now a cute little tile with picture and trimmed headline needing 20x the space to show the same number of stories. bbc.co.uk Or homepages that tell you nothing at all https://www.optimizely.com https://www.optimizely.com I don't want a wall of text, or the complex design and navigation of 10 years back, but I abhor the tendency to tell you next to nothing, but with bootstrap.
- Trufa 11y agoI'm not sure if I understand the categorization of it all, is it non modern web design, or no fluff? Because you can't compare some to others: https://context.co.de/ https://context.co.de/ pretty nice, reminds you of man, nice and simple, one could even call it minimalist or whatever... http://ethanbond.com/ http://ethanbond.com/ not a bad idea for a simple resume page. it's clean cut. http://drudgereport.com/ http://drudgereport.com/ I will never go through that. http://trendlist.org/ http://trendlist.org/ just looks like css is not loading. http://laurelschwulst.com/ http://laurelschwulst.com/ I want to tear my eyes out.
- ekianjo 11y agoIndeed it's more like "it does not fit in the typical buckets so let me create a catch-all exception called brutalism".
- jxy 11y agoThe first two in your list are quite good. The rest is really just eccentric and unusable.
- enjo 11y agoThe Drudge report is used by several million people every day. It happens to be one of a handful of sites on the Internet my mother in law can actually parse and use reliably. I aspire to make something as unusable as the Drudge Report someday.
- Turing_Machine 11y agoI noted below that it has an Alexa rank of 130. Pretty good for an "unusable" site. :-)
- ams6110 11y agoEverything is right in front of you. Nothing hidden behind obscure icons, or lurking out of view waiting for a scroll or mouseover event. I have something very much like it as my browser home page -- a simple local HTML file, no CSS, with links to stuff I commonly use.
- spriggan3 11y agoThat's not "brutalism" as defined by industrial designers and architects ... yet another idiotic buzzword since "flat design" or "zero ui" don't sell anymore, yet another misused expression by web designers .... Seriously, who is making up that crap ?
- frik 11y agoI agree. The next guy will call it "bauhaus".
- TheOtherHobbes 11y agoThe web won't be over until it becomes ironically post-modern.
- adrusi 11y agoTheir definition is copied straight out of the wikipedia article on brutalism. It's not a recent edit, it's been that way for at least a year.
- pnathan 11y agoThat's not brutalism: that's 1990s HTML-centric web design. One emulates a freaking man page.
- marklgr 11y ago> One emulates a freaking man page. It's far from the worst.
- Johnny_Brahms 11y agoWhat was wrong with the man page design? I loved it. Apart from the monospaced font, it is clean and easy to follow.
- kidmenot 11y agoAnd, and... are we not going to talk about how he chose the words so carefully that there is not a single hyphenated one, making every line the same length? Am I missing some obvious shortcut to it or is this guy actually good?
- stevebmark 11y agoI see that for web, as with architecture, "brutalist" is shorthand for "bad"
- spriggan3 11y agoSaying "brutalism" is bad is being totally ignorant of the work of architects like Le Corbusier. https://goo.gl/T5o4Gk https://goo.gl/T5o4Gk On the other hand, half of the links on that website are just bad design and have nothing to do with brutalism.
- Animats 11y agoThis has little to do with architectural brutalism, which was a 1960-70s thing. Characteristics include concrete cast with rough forms, producing a rough surface, a lack of decoration, and fortress-like architecture. Examples include the Boston City Hall[1] and other monumental projects [2], plus a huge number of Soviet and Third World housing blocks built that way because it's cheap. Also most of the world's parking structures. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall [2] http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/feb/13/jonathan-meades-brutalism-a-z http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/feb/13/jonathan...
- enjo 11y agoI mean, I think Le Corbusier's work is sort of awful :) I'm not an architect, just a casual fan of architecture. For my personal taste the whole brutalist movement was a long series of boring, intimidating, and repressive buildings that scar the primarily urban environments they were built in even to this day. Especially University Campuses where the style was so popular for so long (Christopher Alexander is a hero of mine). Interestingly, OP's list of sites are largely ones I dislike as well.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoI can't see a consistent trend here. Whereas, I'm reminded of something else that seems similar but makes more sense. Here's a web and software example of that other philosophy. http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://suckless.org/philosophy http://suckless.org/philosophy
- leviathant 11y ago"Brutalism can be seen as a reaction by a younger generation to the lightness, optimism, and frivolity of todays webdesign" ...except the links include FFFFOUND, Pokey the Penguin, Craigslist, and The Drudge Report - a website almost old enough that it could vote in an American election.
- azazqadir 11y agoExactly. Most of the websites look like they were designed in 90s, which would made them good for their time.
- nxzero 11y agoAlways called sites like these "utralight" though no idea if that's a standard term.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- thought_alarm 11y agoF U N
- cookiemonsta 11y agotired.com is my favourite of this kind
- plaguuuuuu 11y agowat
- bikamonki 11y agoIf borrowing the term from Architecture, then a brutalist website should be one that (only) uses the 'raw' (original) elements of design and functionality (cannot separate both in web design), namely: page layout + font face + color palette for the graphic design component, and links + media for the functional (hypermedia) component. As such, I do not see how modernizing the style through functional paradigms, like a flat design UI, breaks the original canon. However, we could argue that anything else, like flashy add-ons such as element transitions, drop-downs, fades, etc, do break the canon and are just a response to trends, just like a bunch of useless zippers and pockets do not add functional value to a trendy jacket but definitely help sell it. Efficient use of resources and fast loading is a entire different subject. Enter the engineer, leave the architect. It is absolutely possible to program any design paradigm to perform fast and efficiently.
- platz 11y agoI wonder what the website equivalent of concrete is. "There is often an emphasis on graphically expressing in the external elevations and in the whole-site architectural plan the main functions and people-flows of the buildings." This might suggest ways to express navigation that are explicit and not hidden
- ktRolster 11y agoI'm tempted to reply that a brutalist website would be one that keeps decoration to a minimum, but.....that wouldn't fit, because (for example) the Geisel Library has plenty of decoration, it's just in concrete and glass. Maybe a brutalist HTML page would have the tags embedded, kind of like the WordPerfect codes.
- petercooper 11y agoA bit like the Hotmetal editor from 90s? :-) http://literacy.kent.edu/Midwest/Graphics/hotmetal.jpg http://literacy.kent.edu/Midwest/Graphics/hotmetal.jpg
- USAnum1 11y ago
- smegel 11y agoI think I prefer brutalist architecture a lot more. I am quite fond on this one in Sydney that was in the news recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirius_building https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirius_building
- fludlight 11y agoWarren Buffett's holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, could go on this list. Berkshire's operating subsidiaries (Geico, Duracell, Heinz, etc) have fancy modern websites but the investment company's looks like it predates Geocities. IIRC this is because they don't want to spend money on an already functional website that isn't really selling anything.
- wwweston 11y agoA couple of comments in response to other comments: > I can't see a consistent trend here My guess is that's because we're talking about a meta-aesthetic that borders on anti-aesthetic. Particularly for the last 10 years, design on the web and in software in general has been especially trend driven and strongly aestheticized. And arguably in a way that moved outside of consciously or conscientiously chosen and well into either ostentatiousness or default. When people become aware of a trend, they also become aware there's an area of creative opportunity that a lot of people aren't working in. The move from high-relief/"lickable"/skeuomorphic design to flat design is an example everyone here knows. This might be a meta-trend away from strongly aestheticized. Whether or not you can actually have an anti-aesthetic is probably a good philosophical question, but I think as a practical concept. > Just showed some of these to a generally non-tech-savy friend who said he didn't like them because they looked "too 90s." Personally I love them because they load fast, are easy to read, and don't require a knowledge of a bunch of different frameworks to write. Like you, I like a lot of simple pages (sometimes I use Lynx for simplicity!). But as you observed for in your friend, for a general audience, I do think an anti-aesthetic is likely to have an uphill battle; visual communications isn't a science but it's real, and some people make judgments on visuals (and almost everyone is influenced by them).
- undoware 11y ago'Younger generation'. Kids, I wish I could give you my backcopies of NTK. Brutalism is a fine, ancient tradition of web design. Welcome. :)
- mirimir 11y agohttps://hastebin.com/ https://hastebin.com/ vs http://pastebin.com/ http://pastebin.com/ ;)
- quotemstr 11y agohttps://hastebin.com/ https://hastebin.com/ is serving the wrong certificate.
- mirimir 11y agoIt's self-signed, as I recall.
- quotemstr 11y agoThe certificate is for heroku, IIRC. Even if were for the right CN and just self-signed, that'd still make it the wrong certificate.
- mirimir 11y agoThanks. Careless of them :( But still, it's easy to use. No cruft. No annoying CAPTCHAs and other BS when using via Tor. And I only share ASCII-armored encrypted/signed stuff, anyway. So HTTPS doesn't matter much for me. Is there a better pastebin that you'd recommend?
- mmaunder 11y agoOh.ASCII.
- vortico 11y agoIf you don't give a shit about web design but want to portray information effectively, you can use `markdown index.md > index.html` to generate web pages like my personal website. It's not "brutalist" design but just neural in my opinion.
- gradstudent 11y agoIMO, the cited examples are minimalist but not brutalist. When I think of a brutalist website I think of the design elements being exposed as part of the presentation. Frames and tables with exposed borders and ugly html buttons -- not, as suggested by the OP, clean layouts driven by an invisible style sheet. A typical JavaDoc page for example, rather than Hacker News.
- chrismealy 11y agoYeah, I'd call it vernacular rather than brutalist.
- boomlinde 11y agoOlia Lialina wrote a nice article about her idea of a vernacular web. I'm not sure how compatible this is with your idea, but one thing that seems to distinguish these sites from her vernacular web is that they seem very thoughtfully and deliberately designed the way they are -- there is intent and purpose where in the vernacular web she sees happenstance and barely directed expression.
- nailer 11y agoIn addition the page seems to be somewhat fixated with monospace fonts. Deliberately being 'edgy' by showing non-code in monospace isn't brutalist: Times New Roman is.
- kennell 11y agoRelevant: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ and http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com
- praptak 11y agoWanna analogy between brick & mortar and webdesign? Here's one: In both there are ego-driven movements that result in useless, showoff designs. Wanna send a message, make a statement or make a mark? Go paint a picture and hang it in an art gallery. But websites and buildings are something that real people actually use, so fuck off with your -isms. Make websites where content is readable and easy to navigate. Make buildings that are great to live and work in as opposed to those whose mockups look unique and stunning in "Architectural wankery monthly".
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- agumonkey 11y agoI tend to call this vanillahtml. I gathered a few on http://reddit.com/r/vanillahtml http://reddit.com/r/vanillahtml for the curious
- vog 11y agoThere's a somewhat-famous blog which fits quite well into this scheme (sorry, German language, but you won't miss out much, anyway ;-)): https://blog.fefe.de/ https://blog.fefe.de/ Also, the HTML versions of RFCs seem to qualify, such as: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1855 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1855 And of course the HTML versions of manpages are usually renedered in a minimalist style, too: https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=du https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=du
- jokoon 11y agoI submitted mine http://imgur.com/PueJCdO http://imgur.com/PueJCdO Somebody chuckled at me at a job interview when I showed this website :(
- soufron 11y agoGenius! They should add the RMS website.
- V-2 11y agoOf course you can have rich and highly functional design, as well as very functional, minimalist barebone design. It's always harder to come up with a design that's simultaneously pleasing and feels easy to use, but throwing design out of the window altogether is nothing but a copout. It's the easiest thing to do, but is it a solution, or just an attempt to make some sort of a point? To me it's the equivalent of shaky camera and black-and-white filming: every film student's act of rebellion against James Cameron and the like ; )
- rawTruthHurts 11y agoAs opposed to neo-classical websites?
- tragomaskhalos 11y agoAs an overt visual design paradigm, meh. But hallelujah to the idea of a page that just has content, without the trendily de rigeur fucktons of overblown css and pointless javascript that adds 0 and only serves to crash my crappy mobile browser.
- code_research 11y agoPlease post more examples of oldschool, web 0.1 and other ugly websites, thank you! Are there any (curated) online collections ( besides random searching on archive.org)?
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoThe "interview" for the Drudge Report is hilarious.
- jperras 11y agoOur site (fictivekin.com) made that list. I think we'd describe it more as intentinonal retro-minimalism instead of brutalist, but that's just me.
- anthk 11y agoSatan is my Lord!!!
- jiiam 11y agoMost of these websites have zero load time, compared to their fancy non-brutalist counterparts. I's say, let's have more brutalist websites. I know it's because the fancier counterparts are JS-intensive, but it's still a question worth asking: "Why are we in the time where a nice website should take seconds to load?"
- Morantron 11y agohttp://vimbarcelona.org/ http://vimbarcelona.org/ user group website, is so brutalist that it even uses a <blink> tag shameless plug