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UX brutalism
- have_faith 9y agoWhat comes after brutalism in web design? romanticism? new-sincerity? Button labels like "I would appreciate it if you clicked me because I generate ad revenue".
- skummetmaelk 9y ago> "I would appreciate it if you clicked me because I generate ad revenue" This is very likely.
- klez 9y agoYears ago I had a website hosted on Altervista. They allowed ads from their network, but their ToS explicitly forbade adding text to your page that encouraged readers to click on ads. Does Google have this too in their ToS?
- PetahNZ 9y agoYea it explicitly says "Publishers may not ask others to click their ads" along with about 20 other related clauses.
- gonzo41 9y agoMaybe we will trend back to the days when everything had horizontal rules and center alignment. I can't wait!
- TheOtherHobbes 9y agoGeocities 2.0
- have_faith 9y agoI think Vaporwave style websites are the spiritual successor to Geocities design. I'm a big fan. https://edz.neocities.org/ https://edz.neocities.org/
- foolrush 9y agoIf history is any guide, expect a rejection and push against. Possibly with the self referential sign of a sign[1]. Heck... We are already almost there with humourous memes that reference another meme. If anything, Vapor Wave and the retro Geocities-esque show signs of such a pushback. [1] Baudrillard
- saint-loup 9y agoPost-neo-brutalism.
- voidhorse 9y agoPostpostmaterial and the death of the web designer.
- SwellJoe 9y agoThis is funny, but I think also misses the point of Brutalism entirely. Brutalist architecture is functional first (but often beautiful, too). The examples of Brutalist web design almost entirely miss out on being functional by being hard to read, abstract (not merely containing abstract elements, but abstract at its core), and lacking in the clean hard lines commonly seen in Brutalism. There are some examples in the linked gallery (http://brutalistwebsites.com/ http://brutalistwebsites.com/) that I think can be fairly compared to Brutalist architecture, but nowhere near the majority of them. Most are just ugly and gimmicky. Brutalism may have been ugly and gimmicky at times, but it wasn't the core motivating force for any Brutalist work of note.
- falcolas 9y agoFunctional yet beautiful in a clean, hard-line way makes me think of Craigslist. Exceptionally functional, blocky, information-dense, minimal styling... Also, some NSFW images on that brutalist website gallery.
- ptaipale 9y agoOr brutalist architecture claims to be functional, but is sometimes averse to actual functions, because buildings are considered pieces of art. Source: experiences trying to keep computer science classes in a university building designed by famous functionalist architect Alvar Aalto (university now named after him).
- StavrosK 9y agoAt the risk of pulling a No True Scotsman, it seems to me that those buildings (like this website) were inspired by the aesthetics of Brutalism instead of the actual point of the movement. Ie, they tried to make buildings that looked Brutalist, instead of trying to design them to be functional and eschewing (or not paying as much attention to) aesthetics, which (in my uninformed opinion) is what Brutalism, as a movement, was about.
- ptaipale 9y agoThe problem here is that even when building is "functional", the needs of the functions change. If the architect does not allow it, or if the building is not well adaptable, the "functionality" becomes "non-functionality". In my case it was that the architect (who worked in early 1960's) could foresee classrooms with tables, but could not foresee that the classroom tables would have computers connected to a network (as they had in 1980's).
- deepakkarki 9y agoHeh, it took me a while to figure out that this class of design was called "brutalist" by the design folk. I had seen such designs before and wanted to make a similar themed webpage for my side project. I was frantically searching the web for "minimalist design", "black and white design", "newspaper/magazine like web design" etc. Web link for those interested https://discoverdev.io https://discoverdev.io
- k-mcgrady 9y agoYour site seems like a good example of the point of 'brutalist' web design. People seem to be getting hung up on brutalist architecture having shortcomings but in the discussions I've seen around 'brutalist' web design the focus seems to be on getting rid of the pointless background images/videos, the mountains of useless JS, and having a simpler web page that is clean, readable, very fast to load, and gets to the point.
- deepakkarki 9y agoYeah! Made sure my page has zero JS. Don't add what you don't need :)
- Andrenid 9y agoGreat work. Big fan of no-bullshit designs. I really wish websites (and apps!) focused on the content more. HN, Reddit (to an extent), etc are perfect.
- deepakkarki 9y agoThanks for the appreciation!
- duncanawoods 9y agoI liked the naming of the menu links to match the url scheme. It gives a lovely feel of confidence that I understand the function and structure of the site simply from its appearance. That feels true to the Brutalist spirit manifested in web design. However... I felt let down that you compromised the honesty of the design with "/contact-us" actually being a mailto. You took a piece of wood and painted it to look like concrete obscuring its real identity and function for the sake of decorative symmetry.
- Numberwang 9y agoI don't understand the need for this. Material Design is the pinnacle of human creation. Everything should be Material Design forever.
- dom0 9y ago> pinnacle of human creation That's wangernumb!
- nkkollaw 9y agoThis sums it up perfectly: "framework for designing brutalist experiences that your design peers will love". This style is made for other designers, not users. I often hit the back button because besides Bloomberg—after they tweaked it to be less extreme—brutalist websites are absolutely unusable and a nightmare to use. Also, they just seem broken and that reflect bad on the company. Designers should design for users, not themselves.
- gandutraveler 9y agoReddit or HN are best examples of Brutalism.
- acdjuiamadfn 9y agoHN? 1) I have no clue who responded to me 2) I cannot even delete my comments while Paul Graham shouts about privacy from rooftops HN is not even functional, let alone bruatalist. And the reason is simple- they will be shredded down because they know it's easy to say things than to do things.
- christophilus 9y agoYou can easily see who responded to you by looking at your comments under your profile. I can delete my comments... not sure why you wouldn't be able to. I think HN is about as perfect a site for its purpose as I can think of. It's fast. It's fast on mobile. It's fast. It has really consistently interesting links. It has informed conversations that don't generally deteriorate into childish flamewars. It's hella fast.
- squeaky-clean 9y agoYou actually can't delete your comments after an hour or so. Try going back through your profile and deleting any old comment.
- digi_owl 9y agoAnd i kinda like it for it. Over at Reddit i have seen way too many that pop in, make some kind of comment, and then nuke either the comment or the whole account after a short while.
- squeaky-clean 9y agoLikewise, I hate googling for a discussion or review and finding a thread half filled with "This user has deleted their comments with a greasemonkey script..." Besides, after an hour or so your comment is definitely already in Google and any HN crawlers, and probably on archive.org shortly after that.
- geff82 9y agoBrutalism is meant to expose the function in a "brute" way, not necessarily to hurt the eye (yet it does not care). Bad user design might be brutal, but not Brutalism. I think "UX/WEB brutalism" should be based on the minimalism that has spread through the western style web, then taking away some of the beautifying/graphical elements, yet adding "brutally clear" navigation/interaction elements (and not hiding them in a hamburger menu, for example). It should be a pure focus on what is presented (from a content perspective) and how you can use it. Any form of beauty for beauty's sake (like nice background pictures, too much graphics, fancy effects...) should be avoided.
- digitalengineer 9y ago>The brutalist persona document aggregates all the assumptions you have about your users into a single place. This can't be serious right? Assumptions? What about data & research?
- Sean1708 9y ago> Collecting user feedback as early as possible is crucial to finding flaws in your users. I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that there is a possibility that it isn't serious.
- chris__butters 9y agoYou can see brutalism in a lot of late modernist graphic design, which to me is quite ironic seen as it is usually applied to architecture to be function first rather than "lets just make this look brutal" - as with everything this comes down to the audience. Brutalism among graphic design is (from my perspective) mainly targeted at the graphic design elite although when used digitally is targeted at the same as well as those who can see past the prettiness to achieve what they are looking to without any issues.
- retube 9y agoWay better than material
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ianyang 9y agoI can't think of anything I hate more.
- eeZah7Ux 9y agoMaking things ugly on purpose and calling it a feature.
- blunte 9y agoTrying to make things pretty and slick, but adding 20x to page weight and making the page nearly unusable. That's worse.
- staticelf 9y agoNuclear weapons? Mass-murder? Climate change killing society as we know it?
- Bromskloss 9y agoI don't think you've seen the brutalist stuff.
- artur_makly 9y agowhat goe around comes around i guess. Myspace i feel was the epitome of ths so-called "brutalism". worked wonders for them in terms of product differentiation at a time when the first semblemnce of coherent UX design standards were appearing on the web. its great for fringe underground magazines, gamers, music aficionados, and artists of all kinds. personally i hope it trends as the general web has become mind numbingly boring / predictable as fuk.
- artur_makly 9y agowhat goe around comes around i guess. Myspace i feel was the epitome of ths so-called "brutalism". worked wonders for them in terms of product differentiation at a time when the first semblemnce of coherent UX design standards were appearing on the web. its great for fringe underground magazines, gamers, music aficionados, and artists of all kinds. personally i hope it trends as the general web has become mind numbingly boring / predictable as fuk.
- werber 9y agoThis reminds me of Butt magazines aesthetic
- jansho 9y agoI adore UX brutalism. It's a weird paradox that I enjoy design, but at the same time feel that MOST (caps necessary here) of them are actually faff and pretentious. I keep coming back to brutalist style, as the one I feel the least uncomfortable with, and I'm so glad it's now officially recognised. (Or maybe give it two years before I start complaining again.)
- digi_owl 9y agoWhat was that saying about design again. That it is done not when nothing more can be added, but when nothing more can be taken away?
- jansho 9y agoDesign is also about self-expression of the designer, and solving problems by way of manufacturing experiences. Sometimes the two conflict at the cost of the other though.
- tmaly 9y agoI liked how the site gave me the feeling that it is like a learn startup type method of design. I signed up for the newsletter to just see, and plenty of the previous content they make available seems intriguing.
- muzani 9y agoAfter a career of developing MVPs, this really clicks with me on a deep level. This site isn't it though. I do think websites and apps need to be built really fast and easily, but they still have to look better.
- bane 9y agoIt's interesting how the site really reminds me of the GUI design of late 80s early 90s professional software. http://www.guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win203 http://www.guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win203 http://www.guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/geosapple http://www.guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/geosapple http://toastytech.com/guis/gem11.html http://toastytech.com/guis/gem11.html
- FilterSweep 9y ago> It's interesting how the site really reminds me of the GUI design of late 80s Brutalism in America seemed to have begun its decline in the late 80s early 90s as well. Not sure if this was intended by the creator but its an interesting parallel! Also, the Brutalist resurgence is interesting. Its not just with the web, I see plenty of kickstarter projects and other sellers peddling brutalist artifacts.
- digi_owl 9y agoI kinda recall running into a comment from a prominent game dev somewhere, manybe over at Filfre.net, talking about game development rebooting itself from the ground up every time new hardware capabilities came available. Something about how each time new video hardware came available, the first few years of games would be more elaborate tech demos than actual deep games. I wonder if something like that can be applied to computing in general. Just look at how we now throw the GPU at everything, because we can, rather than stop to ask if we should. The Linux GUI for example is still riding the ripples of the wobbly windows and spinning cube that was Compiz. It may have looked good, but was as useful as wings on an elephant.
- JackC 9y agoI like brutalist websites because they remind me of those weird passion projects you find on the web from time to time ... Netochka Nezvanova [1] Ted's Caving Page, with the story of his discovery in a local cave [2] TempleOS [3] Jon Bois' Future of Football [4] They have the vibe of one person with a keyboard and a strange dream, and that's what I love about the web. I feel weird about a UX design shop critiquing this aesthetic, because they're such different worlds, and I don't want the professionalized web shutting down the personal web. But maybe that's the point: web brutalism is a cool, freeing thing in projects that really are personal, but risks becoming selfish or self-indulgent when applied to the wrong project. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20121023110850/http://www.salon.com/2002/03/01/netochka/ http://web.archive.org/web/20121023110850/http://www.salon.c... [2] http://www.angelfire.com/trek/caver/page1.html http://www.angelfire.com/trek/caver/page1.html [3] http://www.templeos.org/ http://www.templeos.org/ [4] https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football
- quake 9y agoTempleOS is one of the strangest projects I've ever seen, and the creator is likely a schizophrenic, but I'm incredibly impressed that he managed to make what he did all on his own. I can't claim to have made a compiler from scratch while on the run from my own hallucinations
- madamelic 9y agoHe is schizophrenic. He used to run around on HN but he gets banned pretty quickly apparently. He might pop in.
- scyclow 9y agoWow, these are great. Especially Ted's Caving Page. It's too bad these sorts of websites are mostly gone...
- b4ux1t3 9y agoAh, Netochka Nezvonova. I remember being supremely attracted to her in high school. By all accounts, she was either insane or just a troll, but there was something alluring about her, like the article mentioned. A large part of why I ended up where I did in life has to do with that early-2000s internet culture. I never realized how seeing sites like these could bring so much nostalgia.
- Bromskloss 9y agoIf only brutalism would have confined itself to website design, I would be satisfied.
- frik 9y agoUX and UI brutalism meets in MetroUI/ModernUI of Win8/10, ugly as hell color schemes and designs. It reminds me of ugly brutalism/"modern architecture" that was so common in 1960s (prefab buildings). The Win3x/9x/XP/Vista/7, iOS6 & current macOS/iOS, Android 5+ UI and UX are so nice.
- thefuzz 9y agoWould you say https://www.technologyreview.com/ https://www.technologyreview.com/ is brutalist design? If so, I'd say it's one of my favourite brutalist websites!
- whack 9y agoIronically enough, WaPo has an entire article about the brutalist trend in web-design, and the very first example they give is Hacker News. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/05/09/the-hottest-trend-in-web-design-is-intentionally-ugly-unusable-sites/?utm_term=.91eae9d7140c https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/05...
- alexandercrohde 9y agoPretty sure HN is brutalism (along with CL, and possible even google). I don't imagine a designer was hired at all for the process.
- tyrust 9y agopg closes his laptop as a single tear wets his cheek
- metrognome 9y agoHN is based on the forum of the language it's written in. http://arclanguage.org/forum http://arclanguage.org/forum
- Bartweiss 9y agoIt's funny - I accept HN as brutalism, but not poor design. (Though I doubt a designer was hired.) The color scheme at HN is superb for a website. #FFFFFF on #000000 is painful to look at, everyone knows that. But most sites have solved the problem with grey-on-white, or even grey-on-grey. It's hard to anyone to read and terrible for those with impaired vision. HN chose solid black on a darkened, but distinctively shaded background. That alone has my lasting gratitude.
- stillhere 9y agoRegarding brutalism: I think Prince Charles said it best, "You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe. When it knocked down our buildings, it didn't replace them with anything more offensive than rubble."
- mhz 9y agoThat website had 18 JS warnings on load :/ Isn't it supposed to be highly functional?
- hatsunearu 9y agosome (all?) of it isn't brutalism, it seems postmodernist.
- werber 9y ago"UX brutalism is a relatively new concept, and we don't expect it to last too long."
- jccalhoun 9y agoFunny. I just ran across the Brutalist Framework the other day http://www.brutalistframework.com/ http://www.brutalistframework.com/ I still can't tell if it is a joke or not.
- b4ux1t3 9y agoIt's either a joke or a gross misunderstanding of Brutalism. I mean, it uses JQuery, for crying out loud. That's not a slight against JQuery, per se, just saying that "Brutalism" would imply a use of raw materials in construction. To extend the metaphor, using JQuery would be like using wood over the bare concrete of a building to make things "better" for the user.
- jccalhoun 9y agoI'm inclined to think joke too because although a lot of people thing brutalist architecture is ugly, it is a specific type of ugly and this doesn't seem to fit. I'm not an expert though. On the other hand there does seem to be a framework you can download which seems like a lot of work for a joke.
- omnimus 9y agoThis is just plain bad. I think it is a great idea. It is a shame it's so badly done.
- pc86 9y ago> The secret to great brutalist UX is contrast. Said on a page with dark grey text on a light grey background.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pesto88 9y agoIt would be nice if they used CSS for all the examples
- JoshMnem 9y agoIt's much better than the accessibility problems (animation, color) that are fundamentally baked into ideas like Material Design.
- d--b 9y agoThe OP assimilates raw aesthetics with neglecting design. Brutalism is as careful as design can be, only with as little aesthetic tricks as possible.
- rch 9y agoIf more sites looked like this we probably wouldn't need amp.
- calebm 9y agoReminds me of a website that seems in this aesthetic, though I would categorize it as more "David Lynch-esque": http://northernground.com/ http://northernground.com/
- omnimus 9y agoMost of the websites labeled as "brutalist" are actually extremely over designed and are made by very good graphic designers. They are "elite" bored/over with mainstream view of what is currently considered pretty and they try to push it further. It's about destroying conservative views. It's like some sort of experimental technology. Design like this is needed because thats how inovation and new ideas come back to mainstream design. So it is not exactly for mainstream audience but for the second wave of designers liking those unusual ideas, taking pieces of it and putting it back into mainstream. I guess it's same process as in music or in computer sciences. The fact that for past few years this kind of design started to be popular among the "elite" means that in next few years we might start to see more websites like reddit and craigslist :)