> Look at Hacker News. Pinboard. The Drudge Report. Adult Swim. Bloomberg Businessweek features. All of these sites [...] eschew the templated, user-friendly in

> 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/