5 ms·

The hottest trend in web design is making intentionally ugly, difficult sites

42 points by dmitriz 10y ago

skittleson 10y ago
Subjective. I actually like this design
tasoeur 10y ago
Open link > get stuck with a fullscreen pay-wall notification. I guess they make their own point?
dmitriz 10y ago
I wonder what is Bloomberg's excuse for breaking user affordance by underlining non-links.
- smelendez 10y ago
  The cover of the print issue that week showed Yahoo's sale as if it were a telephone pole yard sale sign. I think it's trying for a mix of that and the 90s aesthetic. It looks like the confusing ui is only in the first paragraph, right?
  - dmitriz 10y ago
    The underlined non-links go throughout the article. Mocking someone's bad design is hardly a valid reason for hindering own readers, if the purpose of the article is actually being read. As opposed to being visually admired without reading ;)
qopp 10y ago
The article is just recapping the description of and linking to this site: http://brutalistwebsites.com http://brutalistwebsites.com Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11517491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11517491
- basch 10y ago
  https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-report-is-one-of-the-best-designed-sites-on-the-web https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-report-is...
FussyZeus 10y ago
Looking at the brutalistwebsites sites Wow, anyone who sends me one of these as a portfolio wouldn't get hired to write Twilight fan-fiction in my shop.
smelendez 10y ago
Can we call this skeuomorphism? I think so. Many of these websites are imitating an old-fashioned, cozy-feeling interface that happens to be the naive '90s web
state 10y ago
You can thank Metahaven[0] for this. 0 - http://mthvn.tumblr.com/ http://mthvn.tumblr.com/
vosper 10y ago
This article is a load of bullshit, or satire. The referenced Bloomberg article is inexcusably ugly and hard to read. "Eschewing so-called best practices"? Hacker News was virtually unusable on mobile until YC decided it was worth paying any attention at all. It was/is successful despite the design. PG is either an artist ahead of his time or someone who built the simplest thing he was able to cobble together.
taneq 10y ago
It's not about "ugly" or "difficult", it's about minimalist and functional with no frippery. It's hard to argue that, for example, HN is difficult to use. It just doesn't peg your CPU with pointless blinkenlights.
jl6 10y ago
I was fully expecting this to be about websites which are 30% content, 50% advert, 20% broken, with subscribe-to-my-newsletter popups, clickbait links in the middle of the "content", and the final third of the page inaccessible until you sign into Facebook and complete a short survey. And Hacker News is one of the ugly, difficult ones?
- dmitriz 10y ago
  "ugly or difficult" is certainly subjective matter, but at line-height normal (no extra space between the lines), Hacker News isn't exactly optimised for reading.
haliax 10y ago
From the title, I assumed this was going to be about all of those websites that break scrolling and replace it with some cumbersome, unintuitive form of page movement.
unsignedqword 10y ago
Some of those websites are intentionally obtuse to use by design, but I'm not so sure 'web brutalism' is inherently associated with being "difficult." HN is cited as an example: is there anything particularly wrong with HN's interface? Many modern websites nowadays feel over-designed and intimidating. If anything, this new (if you can call it new) brutalist trend potentially could bring about increased usability and a better overall experience.
- dmitriz 10y ago
  Having line-height: 1.6 on HN would go a long way in terms of readability.
  - unsignedqword 10y ago
    Perhaps one or two small changes like changing the line height and a comment de-scope button would be nice for usability. It's important not to go down the slippery slope of adding too much functionality, in my opinion - look at Reddit, for instance. Structurally, very similar to HN, but I'd say it adds a little too much control and detail to the end user. Do I need to know a comment's exact karma rating, the ammount of users online in a subreddit? Does there need to be two different submit buttons? It goes on and on...
  - oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
    Apparently (I can't check right now), HN uses 'line-height: normal'. If that's not readable for you, complain to your browser vendor; they can interpret that value however they want. And, in some ways, it's preferable to specifying a fixed value; it can - and should - be optimised for the specific font. I'm not sure whether the spec allows it, but - in theory - your browser could also optimise 'normal' for line-length.
    - dmitriz 10y ago
      Yes, it is set to `normal`. It is reasonably readable but not excessively reasonably ;) I don't think browser vendors are the right people to blame though. Their job is to give the designer enough control and they mostly succeed or sometimes don't (https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/12/css-baseline-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/12/css-baseline-the-go...) But you certainly cannot expect them to come up with optimal default working for every single site out there. So setting proper line-height has to remain the site's responsibility. And something as simple as unitless 1.4-1.6 would improve readability with any "regular" font. Given that HN isn't exactly famous for using fancy fonts, which isn't a bad thing at all. ;)
golemotron 10y ago
> But brutalism remains one of those things where you know it when you see it. And lately, you see it a lot. Lately? Craigslist and Drudge are both about two decades old. HN, one decade.
- kagamine 10y ago
  Ah, but brutalism is this week's buzzword so all you have to do is not check the actual meaning of the word, make up your definition and start blogging. Remember when skeuomorphism was the buzzword and everybody got that wrong too? I've said this before, but IxD and UX are problem areas in IT when too many people are self-taught. Reading a couple of blogs about the subject isn't enough. Self-taught programmers will see when something works or fails because their code will run or not. IxD and UX have often difficult to define specs and hard to measure results. No formal education in the subject is really easy to spot in people who blog and don't have it. Source: I have a degree in IxD. Far too much of what pops up on the net on this subject is just wrong; but HN users are right in this thread, HN is a good example of a clean and easy to use GUI. Is there room for improvement? Probably. Are those improvements critical to the site? Probably not.
im3w1l 10y ago
I don't think simplistic design like HN's has much in common with those busy, gimmicky pages.
d--b 10y ago
I personally think that this resonate very well with Jaron Lanier's You Are Not A Gadget ideas. Arty people embrace the low level html as a way of framing something of a personal expression. Templates are fine but do make you fit the mold. This is the anti-Medium.com. Also Jaron Lanier's personal website would completely fit the description: http://www.jaronlanier.com/ http://www.jaronlanier.com/
- dmitriz 10y ago
  Impressive personality. But horrendous choice of colors for the web page. To the point of pain for the eyes just to look at it. Not to mention reading.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
ailox 10y ago
This site pulls in 6750,83 KB of data assets and scripts. It has disables the shortcut for the developer tools, and fullscreen-prompts me to give them an email address to read the article. without the option to skip, of course. I am convinced this is not good web design either.
- dmitriz 10y ago
  Not to mention their massive navbar obscuring the view, and the inability to put text into their images ;) http://cl.ly/2x3m091s3U0D http://cl.ly/2x3m091s3U0D
- cvandijk 10y ago
  It disables most other shortcuts too. No fullscreen (F11), no "new tab" (Ctrl+T), no tab-jumping between links and input elements. I usually browse without using a mouse and suddenly got trapped inside this article, since they also disabled "close tab" (Ctrl+W)
  - nitrogen 10y ago
    I absolutely detest the fact that browsers allow overriding core keyboard shortcuts.
    - Houshalter 10y ago
      It's necessary for some things like games and certain web apps. I made a javascript game awhile ago, about guessing the next character in source code, which required disabling Tab.
    - kagamine 10y ago
      I detest the fact that the browser uses the F-keys for its own shortcuts. We have an a web-app ported from a mainframe app that uses the F-keys for functions the _user_ carries out and users love being able to press F1 through F12 to activate buttons and other page elements. Familiar users can navigate throughout a complex app without the mouse and without continuous, repetitive tabbing. Overriding the browser should absolutely be allowed.
dmitriz 10y ago
Despite of their "minimalistic design", Bloomberg still consumes 5+ MB on my mobile connection only to load, with 1+ MB non-cached resources (meaning they will keep consuming bandwidth on every reload).
Ileca 10y ago
It reminded me that project of mine to inject some CSS into Hacker News because how useful this website is, it is truly ugly. My eyes are killed after one hour of reading.
lifeformed 10y ago
I don't understand how someone could call Hacker News "ugly". Maybe it doesn't evoke the positive emotions you get when you view something beautiful, but surely at worst you'd just get a neutral emotional response, not a negative one? It's like calling a blank piece of paper ugly.
- oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
  The author of the piece is clearly not a designer, and clearly doesn't have much of a handle on web design. They refer to HN and Pinboard as 'eschewing user-friendly interfaces' which is the complete opposite of what these clean, fast, simple designs do; for the user in general, but especially for their intended audience. I fear this is simply evidence of how years of exposure to appalling design has blinkered some people. I like your analogy, but I think a better one would be taking a typical paperback novel from your shelf and claiming it were 'ugly' and 'difficult to read'.
WalterBright 10y ago
I frequently get harangued for having "outdated" web designs, but I like them, they are simple and load fast, such as: http://www.digitalmars.com/articles/index.html http://www.digitalmars.com/articles/index.html
- jbb555 10y ago
  Your websites are amongst the best. They load fast, contain the information you want, and you don't have to scroll through megabytes of random junk looking for something useful. The d forums are amongst the fastest and most useable websites I've seen in a long time.
  - WalterBright 10y ago
    Thanks! I hate the modern design where there is one large picture at the top, and you scroll down to read the article. At some point, when scrolling down while reading, the article will randomly jump down a page or two, and I have to scroll back and find the place I was at. I presume there is a purpose to this random jump, as I see it on site after site, but I cannot divine what it might be. One of the reasons I like hackernews is its complete lack of artifice and trendy design. My presentation slides also tend to be simple black on white text, using the default font, with zero decoration, borders, or any sort of design. The upside is even the back row has no trouble reading them :-)
    - jbb555 10y ago
      I feel the same way. It seems to be compulsory to make you scroll through a huge image for no reason these days, and when you do get to some text you have about one paragraph before you have to scroll to the next huge block, usually with some coloured background. I don't know what they are thinking...
      - WalterBright 10y ago
        Maybe it's supposed to be "cool" like buying new jeans that are already ripped. My JCPenney jeans look like Abercrombie&Fitch jeans after a few months all by themselves.
LeoPanthera 10y ago
Irony. http://i.imgur.com/J8AJJBh.png http://i.imgur.com/J8AJJBh.png
- stryk 10y ago
  I was about to post the exact same thing, I even broke out the (terrible) MS Paint skills on a screenshot to illustrate how asinine this is. https://imgur.com/uxMaCKI https://imgur.com/uxMaCKI
Springtime 10y ago
> Look at Hacker News. Pinboard. The Drudge Report. Adult Swim. Bloomberg Businessweek features. All of these sites [...] eschew the templated, user-friendly interfaces [...] Instead they’re built on imperfect, hand-coded HTML and take their design cues from ’90s graphics. There's a major difference between sites like HN and Pinboard to the Adult Swim and the Bloomberg sites linked. The former are functionally straightforward and lacking 'flair' while the latter are merely visually styled after a quasi-90s-esque aesthetic and are attention-seeking. It's what's trending in design currently. It's not the first time we've seen stripped down designs/ethos for sites in recent years. Around 2010 or so I can remember a slew of blogs with designs similar to the Drudge Report and such. A very neat purely text file based CMS named Stacey [1] practically made it a core part of the design process. [1] http://www.staceyapp.com/ http://www.staceyapp.com/

42 points by dmitriz 10y ago

skittleson 10y ago

Subjective. I actually like this design

tasoeur 10y ago

Open link > get stuck with a fullscreen pay-wall notification. I guess they make their own point?

dmitriz 10y ago

I wonder what is Bloomberg's excuse for breaking user affordance by underlining non-links.

smelendez 10y ago
The cover of the print issue that week showed Yahoo's sale as if it were a telephone pole yard sale sign. I think it's trying for a mix of that and the 90s aesthetic. It looks like the confusing ui is only in the first paragraph, right?
- dmitriz 10y ago
  The underlined non-links go throughout the article. Mocking someone's bad design is hardly a valid reason for hindering own readers, if the purpose of the article is actually being read. As opposed to being visually admired without reading ;)

qopp 10y ago

The article is just recapping the description of and linking to this site: http://brutalistwebsites.com http://brutalistwebsites.com Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11517491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11517491

basch 10y ago
https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-report-is-one-of-the-best-designed-sites-on-the-web https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-report-is...

FussyZeus 10y ago

Looking at the brutalistwebsites sites Wow, anyone who sends me one of these as a portfolio wouldn't get hired to write Twilight fan-fiction in my shop.

smelendez 10y ago

Can we call this skeuomorphism? I think so. Many of these websites are imitating an old-fashioned, cozy-feeling interface that happens to be the naive '90s web

state 10y ago

You can thank Metahaven[0] for this. 0 - http://mthvn.tumblr.com/ http://mthvn.tumblr.com/

vosper 10y ago

This article is a load of bullshit, or satire. The referenced Bloomberg article is inexcusably ugly and hard to read. "Eschewing so-called best practices"? Hacker News was virtually unusable on mobile until YC decided it was worth paying any attention at all. It was/is successful despite the design. PG is either an artist ahead of his time or someone who built the simplest thing he was able to cobble together.

taneq 10y ago

It's not about "ugly" or "difficult", it's about minimalist and functional with no frippery. It's hard to argue that, for example, HN is difficult to use. It just doesn't peg your CPU with pointless blinkenlights.

jl6 10y ago

I was fully expecting this to be about websites which are 30% content, 50% advert, 20% broken, with subscribe-to-my-newsletter popups, clickbait links in the middle of the "content", and the final third of the page inaccessible until you sign into Facebook and complete a short survey. And Hacker News is one of the ugly, difficult ones?

dmitriz 10y ago
"ugly or difficult" is certainly subjective matter, but at line-height normal (no extra space between the lines), Hacker News isn't exactly optimised for reading.

haliax 10y ago

From the title, I assumed this was going to be about all of those websites that break scrolling and replace it with some cumbersome, unintuitive form of page movement.

unsignedqword 10y ago

Some of those websites are intentionally obtuse to use by design, but I'm not so sure 'web brutalism' is inherently associated with being "difficult." HN is cited as an example: is there anything particularly wrong with HN's interface? Many modern websites nowadays feel over-designed and intimidating. If anything, this new (if you can call it new) brutalist trend potentially could bring about increased usability and a better overall experience.

dmitriz 10y ago
Having line-height: 1.6 on HN would go a long way in terms of readability.
- unsignedqword 10y ago
  Perhaps one or two small changes like changing the line height and a comment de-scope button would be nice for usability. It's important not to go down the slippery slope of adding too much functionality, in my opinion - look at Reddit, for instance. Structurally, very similar to HN, but I'd say it adds a little too much control and detail to the end user. Do I need to know a comment's exact karma rating, the ammount of users online in a subreddit? Does there need to be two different submit buttons? It goes on and on...
- oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
  Apparently (I can't check right now), HN uses 'line-height: normal'. If that's not readable for you, complain to your browser vendor; they can interpret that value however they want. And, in some ways, it's preferable to specifying a fixed value; it can - and should - be optimised for the specific font. I'm not sure whether the spec allows it, but - in theory - your browser could also optimise 'normal' for line-length.
  - dmitriz 10y ago
    Yes, it is set to `normal`. It is reasonably readable but not excessively reasonably ;) I don't think browser vendors are the right people to blame though. Their job is to give the designer enough control and they mostly succeed or sometimes don't (https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/12/css-baseline-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/12/css-baseline-the-go...) But you certainly cannot expect them to come up with optimal default working for every single site out there. So setting proper line-height has to remain the site's responsibility. And something as simple as unitless 1.4-1.6 would improve readability with any "regular" font. Given that HN isn't exactly famous for using fancy fonts, which isn't a bad thing at all. ;)

golemotron 10y ago

> But brutalism remains one of those things where you know it when you see it. And lately, you see it a lot. Lately? Craigslist and Drudge are both about two decades old. HN, one decade.

kagamine 10y ago
Ah, but brutalism is this week's buzzword so all you have to do is not check the actual meaning of the word, make up your definition and start blogging. Remember when skeuomorphism was the buzzword and everybody got that wrong too? I've said this before, but IxD and UX are problem areas in IT when too many people are self-taught. Reading a couple of blogs about the subject isn't enough. Self-taught programmers will see when something works or fails because their code will run or not. IxD and UX have often difficult to define specs and hard to measure results. No formal education in the subject is really easy to spot in people who blog and don't have it. Source: I have a degree in IxD. Far too much of what pops up on the net on this subject is just wrong; but HN users are right in this thread, HN is a good example of a clean and easy to use GUI. Is there room for improvement? Probably. Are those improvements critical to the site? Probably not.

im3w1l 10y ago

I don't think simplistic design like HN's has much in common with those busy, gimmicky pages.

d--b 10y ago

I personally think that this resonate very well with Jaron Lanier's You Are Not A Gadget ideas. Arty people embrace the low level html as a way of framing something of a personal expression. Templates are fine but do make you fit the mold. This is the anti-Medium.com. Also Jaron Lanier's personal website would completely fit the description: http://www.jaronlanier.com/ http://www.jaronlanier.com/

dmitriz 10y ago
Impressive personality. But horrendous choice of colors for the web page. To the point of pain for the eyes just to look at it. Not to mention reading.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

ailox 10y ago

This site pulls in 6750,83 KB of data assets and scripts. It has disables the shortcut for the developer tools, and fullscreen-prompts me to give them an email address to read the article. without the option to skip, of course. I am convinced this is not good web design either.

dmitriz 10y ago
Not to mention their massive navbar obscuring the view, and the inability to put text into their images ;) http://cl.ly/2x3m091s3U0D http://cl.ly/2x3m091s3U0D
cvandijk 10y ago
It disables most other shortcuts too. No fullscreen (F11), no "new tab" (Ctrl+T), no tab-jumping between links and input elements. I usually browse without using a mouse and suddenly got trapped inside this article, since they also disabled "close tab" (Ctrl+W)
- nitrogen 10y ago
  I absolutely detest the fact that browsers allow overriding core keyboard shortcuts.
  - Houshalter 10y ago
    It's necessary for some things like games and certain web apps. I made a javascript game awhile ago, about guessing the next character in source code, which required disabling Tab.
  - kagamine 10y ago
    I detest the fact that the browser uses the F-keys for its own shortcuts. We have an a web-app ported from a mainframe app that uses the F-keys for functions the _user_ carries out and users love being able to press F1 through F12 to activate buttons and other page elements. Familiar users can navigate throughout a complex app without the mouse and without continuous, repetitive tabbing. Overriding the browser should absolutely be allowed.

dmitriz 10y ago

Despite of their "minimalistic design", Bloomberg still consumes 5+ MB on my mobile connection only to load, with 1+ MB non-cached resources (meaning they will keep consuming bandwidth on every reload).

Ileca 10y ago

It reminded me that project of mine to inject some CSS into Hacker News because how useful this website is, it is truly ugly. My eyes are killed after one hour of reading.

lifeformed 10y ago

I don't understand how someone could call Hacker News "ugly". Maybe it doesn't evoke the positive emotions you get when you view something beautiful, but surely at worst you'd just get a neutral emotional response, not a negative one? It's like calling a blank piece of paper ugly.

oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
The author of the piece is clearly not a designer, and clearly doesn't have much of a handle on web design. They refer to HN and Pinboard as 'eschewing user-friendly interfaces' which is the complete opposite of what these clean, fast, simple designs do; for the user in general, but especially for their intended audience. I fear this is simply evidence of how years of exposure to appalling design has blinkered some people. I like your analogy, but I think a better one would be taking a typical paperback novel from your shelf and claiming it were 'ugly' and 'difficult to read'.

WalterBright 10y ago

I frequently get harangued for having "outdated" web designs, but I like them, they are simple and load fast, such as: http://www.digitalmars.com/articles/index.html http://www.digitalmars.com/articles/index.html

jbb555 10y ago
Your websites are amongst the best. They load fast, contain the information you want, and you don't have to scroll through megabytes of random junk looking for something useful. The d forums are amongst the fastest and most useable websites I've seen in a long time.
- WalterBright 10y ago
  Thanks! I hate the modern design where there is one large picture at the top, and you scroll down to read the article. At some point, when scrolling down while reading, the article will randomly jump down a page or two, and I have to scroll back and find the place I was at. I presume there is a purpose to this random jump, as I see it on site after site, but I cannot divine what it might be. One of the reasons I like hackernews is its complete lack of artifice and trendy design. My presentation slides also tend to be simple black on white text, using the default font, with zero decoration, borders, or any sort of design. The upside is even the back row has no trouble reading them :-)
  - jbb555 10y ago
    I feel the same way. It seems to be compulsory to make you scroll through a huge image for no reason these days, and when you do get to some text you have about one paragraph before you have to scroll to the next huge block, usually with some coloured background. I don't know what they are thinking...
    - WalterBright 10y ago
      Maybe it's supposed to be "cool" like buying new jeans that are already ripped. My JCPenney jeans look like Abercrombie&Fitch jeans after a few months all by themselves.

LeoPanthera 10y ago

Irony. http://i.imgur.com/J8AJJBh.png http://i.imgur.com/J8AJJBh.png

stryk 10y ago
I was about to post the exact same thing, I even broke out the (terrible) MS Paint skills on a screenshot to illustrate how asinine this is. https://imgur.com/uxMaCKI https://imgur.com/uxMaCKI

Springtime 10y ago

> Look at Hacker News. Pinboard. The Drudge Report. Adult Swim. Bloomberg Businessweek features. All of these sites [...] eschew the templated, user-friendly interfaces [...] Instead they’re built on imperfect, hand-coded HTML and take their design cues from ’90s graphics. There's a major difference between sites like HN and Pinboard to the Adult Swim and the Bloomberg sites linked. The former are functionally straightforward and lacking 'flair' while the latter are merely visually styled after a quasi-90s-esque aesthetic and are attention-seeking. It's what's trending in design currently. It's not the first time we've seen stripped down designs/ethos for sites in recent years. Around 2010 or so I can remember a slew of blogs with designs similar to the Drudge Report and such. A very neat purely text file based CMS named Stacey [1] practically made it a core part of the design process. [1] http://www.staceyapp.com/ http://www.staceyapp.com/