5 ms·

I'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

by Trufa 10y ago

I'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 10y ago
Indeed it's more like "it does not fit in the typical buckets so let me create a catch-all exception called brutalism".
jxy 10y ago
The first two in your list are quite good. The rest is really just eccentric and unusable.
- enjo 10y ago
  The 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 10y ago
    I noted below that it has an Alexa rank of 130. Pretty good for an "unusable" site. :-)
  - ams6110 10y ago
    Everything 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.
    - joeyjojo 10y ago
      As a designer I think the design is really bad. It may work pretty well from a functional point of view, but the readability could be improved dramatically with just a few typographical adjustments. If you gave this page to a designer and said, change nothing but the font, font size, colour, padding, and margins you could keep the functionally the same but it make much more comfortable on the eyes and easier to decipher.
      - prodigal_erik 10y ago
        There's no reason browsers should have trouble rendering an unstyled page in a readable way. It's a pity they stopped working on it on the (unfortunately correct) assumption that most pages are written by control freaks who put huge efforts into one or two idiosyncratic visual presentations.
        jorams 10y ago
        Do note that Drudge Report is far from an unstyled page. I'd say the styling it does have is far worse than the default browser styling in terms of readability.
        ashitlerferad 10y ago
        As much as I would like to see browsers having nicer default styles (and all browsers ignoring website CSS), it will never happen because too many websites will break as a result since many of them implicitly rely on certain defaults like black text on a white background, link colours and other stuff.
        lmm 10y ago
        I feel like browsers could improve their defaults without breaking that: make the background slightly off-white, text slightly off-black, add some small margins at the edges. Or even just import the Bootstrap 2 stylesheet as a default.
        majewsky 10y ago
  - PhasmaFelis 10y ago
    It still looks like something a college student in 1997 would have made as a deliberate parody of bad websites. Literally all the text on the front page is monospace and underlined. Why?
    - Turing_Machine 10y ago
      Virtually all of the text is underlined because virtually everything on that page is a link. It dates from a time before it was considered "good design" and "usability" to hide the links from the readers.
      - PhasmaFelis 10y ago
        If everything's a link, then you hardly need special notation to call out the links from the non-links. It's not a conscious effort to make links more identifiable; it just didn't occur to the creator that you can do something with links other than underline them.
userbinator 10y ago
http://drudgereport.com/ http://drudgereport.com/ reminds me of http://stallman.org/ http://stallman.org/
- ams6110 10y ago
  Its interesting to me that many of the people who are in the "who's who" of our space have a very bare-bones web presence. http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dfried/ http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dfried/ http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/ http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/ http://javascript.crockford.com/ http://javascript.crockford.com/
  - WalterSear 10y ago
    Those aren't the who's who of visual design though.
  - efnx 10y ago
    It seems to me that web design trends tend to change faster than most people's patience for maintaining their personal site, so it makes sense that anyone with a sufficient amount of work to do who is not a web designer would choose a very simple "just get the info out there" design. Specifically these guys you posted have been in computing forever and are very, very busy. Personally I can't justify more than updating bootstrap every six months or so. I'd rather spend that time on open source or with my family.
  - jackmoore 10y ago
    http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/ http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/
  - bal00ns 10y ago
    I particularly enjoy how going to http://javascript.crockford.com/ http://javascript.crockford.com/ doesn't load any javascript.
- chrisdone 10y ago
  Funny thing about Stallman's site is that I can't click "Fiction". Due to the italics change it moves around and disappears from under my cursor. You associate simple sites with usability, but in this case it's just as perilous as any other.
jaywunder 10y ago
drudgereport.com seems hypocritical to me because they don't have many images for their own news stories, but make room for images that advertise other products. Advisments are counter-brutalism because they're very much frivolous and attention grabbing.
- bendykstra 10y ago
  You can think of the ads as being like the exposed ducts and conduits of brutalist buildings. They power the site.
  - theoh 10y ago
    Architectural historian here. Exposed services (ducts etc.) are a characteristic of High Tech architecture, not brutalism. Many non-specialists think brutalism is more broadly applicable term than it actually is...
    - sevensor 10y ago
      Thanks for the clarification! My favorite example in this style is the Digital Computer Lab at the University of Illinois. Until now, I didn't have a word for it. http://uihistories.library.illinois.edu/virtualtour/engineering/dcl/ http://uihistories.library.illinois.edu/virtualtour/engineer... I really enjoyed the aesthetic effect of the exposed pipes and wire conduits.
ryan-allen 10y ago
http://craigslist.com/ http://craigslist.com/ is pretty straight up
azazqadir 10y ago
That's what I was thinking. Not all the websites look "brutalist" to me, some are okay. But some websites are really brutal and a pain to look at, like this one: http://kioskkiosk.com/ http://kioskkiosk.com/ This one is a joke.
- zyx321 10y ago
  Brutalism is not supposed to be painful or unpleasant, just brutally honest. Brutalist buildings look like giant blocks of raw concrete (béton brut), because that's exactly what they are and no effort is wasted on hiding that fact.

by Trufa 10y ago

ekianjo 10y ago

Indeed it's more like "it does not fit in the typical buckets so let me create a catch-all exception called brutalism".

jxy 10y ago

The first two in your list are quite good. The rest is really just eccentric and unusable.

enjo 10y ago
The 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 10y ago
  I noted below that it has an Alexa rank of 130. Pretty good for an "unusable" site. :-)
- ams6110 10y ago
  Everything 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.
  - joeyjojo 10y ago
    As a designer I think the design is really bad. It may work pretty well from a functional point of view, but the readability could be improved dramatically with just a few typographical adjustments. If you gave this page to a designer and said, change nothing but the font, font size, colour, padding, and margins you could keep the functionally the same but it make much more comfortable on the eyes and easier to decipher.
    - prodigal_erik 10y ago
      There's no reason browsers should have trouble rendering an unstyled page in a readable way. It's a pity they stopped working on it on the (unfortunately correct) assumption that most pages are written by control freaks who put huge efforts into one or two idiosyncratic visual presentations.
      - jorams 10y ago
        Do note that Drudge Report is far from an unstyled page. I'd say the styling it does have is far worse than the default browser styling in terms of readability.
      - ashitlerferad 10y ago
        As much as I would like to see browsers having nicer default styles (and all browsers ignoring website CSS), it will never happen because too many websites will break as a result since many of them implicitly rely on certain defaults like black text on a white background, link colours and other stuff.
        lmm 10y ago
        I feel like browsers could improve their defaults without breaking that: make the background slightly off-white, text slightly off-black, add some small margins at the edges. Or even just import the Bootstrap 2 stylesheet as a default.
        majewsky 10y ago
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago
  It still looks like something a college student in 1997 would have made as a deliberate parody of bad websites. Literally all the text on the front page is monospace and underlined. Why?
  - Turing_Machine 10y ago
    Virtually all of the text is underlined because virtually everything on that page is a link. It dates from a time before it was considered "good design" and "usability" to hide the links from the readers.
    - PhasmaFelis 10y ago
      If everything's a link, then you hardly need special notation to call out the links from the non-links. It's not a conscious effort to make links more identifiable; it just didn't occur to the creator that you can do something with links other than underline them.

userbinator 10y ago

http://drudgereport.com/ http://drudgereport.com/ reminds me of http://stallman.org/ http://stallman.org/

ams6110 10y ago
Its interesting to me that many of the people who are in the "who's who" of our space have a very bare-bones web presence. http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dfried/ http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dfried/ http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/ http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/ http://javascript.crockford.com/ http://javascript.crockford.com/
- WalterSear 10y ago
  Those aren't the who's who of visual design though.
- efnx 10y ago
  It seems to me that web design trends tend to change faster than most people's patience for maintaining their personal site, so it makes sense that anyone with a sufficient amount of work to do who is not a web designer would choose a very simple "just get the info out there" design. Specifically these guys you posted have been in computing forever and are very, very busy. Personally I can't justify more than updating bootstrap every six months or so. I'd rather spend that time on open source or with my family.
- jackmoore 10y ago
  http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/ http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/
- bal00ns 10y ago
  I particularly enjoy how going to http://javascript.crockford.com/ http://javascript.crockford.com/ doesn't load any javascript.
chrisdone 10y ago
Funny thing about Stallman's site is that I can't click "Fiction". Due to the italics change it moves around and disappears from under my cursor. You associate simple sites with usability, but in this case it's just as perilous as any other.

jaywunder 10y ago

drudgereport.com seems hypocritical to me because they don't have many images for their own news stories, but make room for images that advertise other products. Advisments are counter-brutalism because they're very much frivolous and attention grabbing.

bendykstra 10y ago
You can think of the ads as being like the exposed ducts and conduits of brutalist buildings. They power the site.
- theoh 10y ago
  Architectural historian here. Exposed services (ducts etc.) are a characteristic of High Tech architecture, not brutalism. Many non-specialists think brutalism is more broadly applicable term than it actually is...
  - sevensor 10y ago
    Thanks for the clarification! My favorite example in this style is the Digital Computer Lab at the University of Illinois. Until now, I didn't have a word for it. http://uihistories.library.illinois.edu/virtualtour/engineering/dcl/ http://uihistories.library.illinois.edu/virtualtour/engineer... I really enjoyed the aesthetic effect of the exposed pipes and wire conduits.

ryan-allen 10y ago

http://craigslist.com/ http://craigslist.com/ is pretty straight up

azazqadir 10y ago

That's what I was thinking. Not all the websites look "brutalist" to me, some are okay. But some websites are really brutal and a pain to look at, like this one: http://kioskkiosk.com/ http://kioskkiosk.com/ This one is a joke.

zyx321 10y ago
Brutalism is not supposed to be painful or unpleasant, just brutally honest. Brutalist buildings look like giant blocks of raw concrete (béton brut), because that's exactly what they are and no effort is wasted on hiding that fact.