11 ms·

Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

335 points by vanni 8y ago

forkLding 8y ago
Reminds me of the Adbusters Magazine I used to read as a kid. Philosophically and aesthetically brutalist and uncomfortable.
- kolpa 8y ago
  What does "Philosophically and aesthetically brutalist and uncomfortable." mean?
  - forkLding 8y ago
    Will understand when you pick one up by accident at a local library if they have it, its very aesthetically well done but also usually uncomfortable content Example: https://adbusters.org/ https://adbusters.org/
- Chaebixi 8y ago
  Adbusters Magazine is the epitome of style over substance.
pkamb 8y ago
I was blown away by the new Northwest Film Forum website: https://nwfilmforum.org/ https://nwfilmforum.org/ Also, a link to Brutalism worth protecting of the concrete variety: http://www.sosbrutalism.org/cms/15802395 http://www.sosbrutalism.org/cms/15802395
- jboles 8y ago
  Sadly the Sirius building is likely to be torn down :-(
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- nugi 8y ago
  1st link, 'javascript is required'. Brutal indeed.
tomc1985 8y ago
And yet for all its supposed innovation, web brutalistism still looks overly pretentious as it revels in its 'aesthetic' of psuedo-Swiss minimalism. I'm sick of the garbage that designers these days pass off as 'form'. It ruins computing. Sci-fi showed us the future was large screens full of data and smart humans doing meaningful shit with it... but reality is we pay beaucorp bucks to waste 98% of a 4K, 9-megapixel display on a royal purple background with a couple of words in white.
- mnemonicsloth 8y ago
  Beaucorp! What a great new word. One of the world-spanning megacorporations from William Gibson but decorated in a Beaux-Arts style.
  - tomc1985 8y ago
    It's an old word, afaik. Means 'mega' in this context. Also I mispelled it :D
    - khedoros1 8y ago
      I think they know that, and were riffing off the misspelling ;-) It's about an 800 year old word in French. Wiktionary claims that it was imported to US English primarily by GIs returning from the Vietnam War. I'd assume that it would come more directly from French, in other forms of English.
      - code_duck 8y ago
        I recall this being brought up by a guy who had been a helicopter mechanic in the Army... he believed it was a Vietnamese word spelled ‘buku’, and it took me some time to realize he meant beaucoup. Example in context: “They’re making buku bucks over there.”
        khedoros1 8y ago
        My father was in the Marine Corps; about a decade too young for Vietnam, but I kind of assume he picked it up from Marines who'd been in the service at the appropriate time. From my perspective, for a long time it was just another one of those weird-sounding words that only Dad used (which turned out to be French, German, and Spanish).
wffurr 8y ago
Please no. Branding through UX is bad UX. Simple, reliable, transferrable, easy to understand UX is good UX. Not everything has to be a billboard. I don't want a hammer where the handle is an iron rod embossed with the maker's logo. I just want an ergonomic wooden handle that does the job.
- Chaebixi 8y ago
  > Please no. Branding through UX is bad UX. I agree. > Simple, ..., transferrable, easy to understand UX is good UX. I disagree. I think the first part of OP raised some good points. The copy everyone's copying and that everyone understand may just be an inferior local maxima. I think this podcast gets at some of the lost potential: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/of-mice-and-men/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/of-mice-and-men/
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > I disagree. I think the first part of OP raised some good points. The copy everyone's copying and that everyone understand may just be an inferior local maxima. Yup. But the way out of those inferior local maxima is by focusing on making UX more "simple, reliable, easy to understand". By focusing on being different and expressing your brand identity, you go towards even worse state than the local maximum you're trying to escape.
gweinberg 8y ago
Sounds to me more like a terrible idea that nobody needs.
master_ant 8y ago
I'm starting to get tired of the cookie-cutter Bootstrap and Squarespace templates taking over the web. This is a refreshing read, I like the comparisons it makes to brutalism in architecture.
- kolpa 8y ago
  It's backwards, though, because Bootstrap and Squarespace are Brutalist (to whatever extent that word really applies to the web at all): cheap, egalitarian, and simple to use.
  - spking 8y ago
    Correct. Bootstrap is the IKEA of frontend frameworks. Simple, predictable, cheap/free, and easy enough for almost anyone to pick up and build with.
Rotdhizon 8y ago
I was impressed with the brutalist architecture, those plain concrete buildings have something about them that I can't place. Maybe like the old concrete tower hovering over the backdrop of a new, colorful, city? Something about it peeks your senses. As for the web design, it was also interesting. I liked some of the designs, others not so much. The website for zku: http://www.zku-berlin.org http://www.zku-berlin.org Something about that just feels comforting, if not nostalgic, like what you'd expect to see from an early 2000s webpage before things got fancy. I think what makes these sites pop for me is the contrast of colors, too much white ruins the effect. Having out of place, darker colors thrown in feels like its breaking the rules, in a good way.
- kaiby 8y ago
  I thought the same thing: when I first went to that site, I immediately thought, "I could've sworn I had made a site that looked like this back in the late 90’s..."
- mhink 8y ago
  > Something about that just feels comforting, if not nostalgic, like what you'd expect to see from an early 2000s webpage before things got fancy. I think what makes these sites pop for me is the contrast of colors, too much white ruins the effect. Having out of place, darker colors thrown in feels like its breaking the rules, in a good way. To me, the page feels like a Geocities site that "grew up"- in a good way. The "chunkiness" of the element borders reminds me of the traditional default styling of <table> elements. You're also spot on with the contrast: I just checked, and this site's design is based on only three colors: #fff, #000, and #ff0. That's a pretty bold design statement, and they pull it off.
- sporkologist 8y ago
  It's refreshing seeing a site without a mystery-meat UI.
simplify 8y ago
Most web design trends since the 90s have been progressive. Brutalism feels like a step backwards for the sake of being different. Feels like one of those trends that will be very short-lived.
digi_owl 8y ago
When i think web-brutalism i do not think of anything illustrated in this article. I think of (old) Reddit, Craigslist, this very "forum", and similar ones that are mostly text with minimal/no JS or graphics.
- hammerandtongs 8y ago
  Yes this article seems to be redefining "web brutalism" to be a simple recoloring of the same wretched over designed unusable webpages that "web brutalism" was a reaction to.
- tzahola 8y ago
  This. Brutalism is inherently utilitarian. Content over presentation. IETF RFCs are brutalist.
  - tfranco 8y ago
    Won the internet
- cpeterso 8y ago
  The Drudge Report is another good example of a brutalist, content-over-presentation website.
deepakkarki 8y ago
The brutalist style works when it is the right design for the job, just shoehorning it for the sake of "design aesthetics" makes no sense. In fact it would work great for HN style webpages. I run something similar - DiscoverDev ( https://discoverdev.io https://discoverdev.io ) and got a lot of compliments on the "brutalist design". Then again it is a minimilist site, I really doubt this would work well for larger applications.
kaiby 8y ago
I actually really like the usage of borders in these "brutalist" designs. Current design trends seem to minimize or eliminate borders altogether, which makes it hard to visually separate content, which makes it hard for users to find the content they want. I thought I could browse through the text on these new sites faster because the borders were so much more prominent [0]. I think the random placement of links is a tricky thing though. One one hand it brings identity to your brand, but on the other hand, it’s not intuitive for the user. [0] http://www.zku-berlin.org/ http://www.zku-berlin.org/, pkamb below also linked https://nwfilmforum.org/ https://nwfilmforum.org/
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- krrrh 8y ago
  In the late nineties I had the impression that Shepard Fairey’s original Mozilla logo really set the tone for thick border design. So many influential web designers frequently spent time on the site, and it felt like a thousand thick border stylesheets bloomed across the web for a few years. https://web.archive.org/web/20000229231038/http://www.mozilla.org:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000229231038/http://www.mozill...
tzahola 8y ago
These people are conflating brutalism with postmodernism. A brutalist website would be one without a stylesheet, or a simple txt file rendered in monospace. These are just websites that go out of their way to be ugly and unusable. Nothing to do with brutalism, and more to do with pretentious art school graduates ruminating on the critical theory of intersectional webdesign or some other bullshit.
smacktoward 8y ago
I'm confused. I don't see what makes most of the examples cited here "Brutalist" in any meaningful fashion. Brutalism is, of course, a fuzzy (and contentious) label to begin with. But the article cites two interpretations of the term that we could use to evaluate how Brutalist a given design is: honest, unpretentious and anti-bourgeois and a sense of roughness, exposed structures and visible thought processes The problem is, I'm not seeing a lot of either of these in the examples provided. If you asked me to name a site whose design is "honest, unpretentious and anti-bourgeois," for instance, examples that would leap to my mind are Craigslist and HN -- both of which focus on simple (even drab) layouts dominated by plain old text. But the examples are full of vibrant colors, big images and irregular, unconventional layouts! They're refreshing and interesting to look at, but that doesn't make them Brutalist. And to the other definition, "exposed structures and visible thought processes," I'd point to... well, I'm not sure what I'd point to. I'm not sure there is any web site that would qualify as Brutalist by this definition. Are there any sites that let their plumbing hang conspicuously out on the sides? Bloomberg and Dropbox and the Outline certainly don't. I'd think of this more as a site where you interact with it via an API or the developer console or some heavy, overwhelming user interface than as a news site that happens to have decided to use giant fonts and screaming neon colors. If we want to have Brutalism as a valid design approach for the web, we first need to decide on what exactly the word means. Otherwise it will just become a parking lot for whatever trends happen to be fashionable at the moment, which is not a great way to build something that will make a lasting impact.
- sagichmal 8y ago
  Brutalist design encompasses both Craigslist and these examples. There are commonalities there, as well as differences.
  - throwaway2048 8y ago
    such as?
  - dangerbird2 8y ago
    Also Wikipedia and a certain tech-centric online forum, to an extent.
cschmidt 8y ago
I guess I'm missing the connection on those websites to Brutalist architecture. It seems more like they're bored with regular design, and want to be more experimental. It reminds conceptually more of Emigre magazine [1] or Ray Gun [2], where the design didn't have to be "readable". [1] https://www.emigre.com/Magazine [2] http://www.davidcarsondesign.com/t/tag/raygun/
quantumofmalice 8y ago
Archived link since the site has been, ahem, brutalized: https://archive.fo/3W7yY https://archive.fo/3W7yY There isn't really an argument for brutalism except laziness and the usual contempt the design community has for its end users. Minimalism has its place, as does maximalism, depending on the context within the application. But that requires actual thinking and then both taste and skill, respectively. Much easier to just wallow in contempt with occasional outbursts of sarcastic novelty, as architecture has done for the last sixty years.
- tfranco 8y ago
  Whas the site down?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
robeastham 8y ago
Original article currently offline for me and so I found it here: https://web.archive.org/web/20180413180014/https://www.imaginarycloud.com/blog/why-we-need-web-brutalism/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180413180014/https://www.imagi...
SlapHappy 8y ago
I think HN is better example of "brutalist" web design than most of the examples. Plain typefaces and colors, rigid lines and block-y structures. As for the bit about brutalism being "honest, unpretentious and anti-bourgeois" - LOL - the only people who actually rave about it as an aesthetic are the most pretentious people I know (not that there's anything wrong w/ that).
- Semiapies 8y ago
  And "challenging" people or making them "uncomfortable" was never what the Brutalists were trying to do. They were utopians trying to build useful, life-improving structures unhampered by convention and superficial decoration. Any aesthetics had to come from the fundamental design and undisguised materials. Their designs often had a lot of practical problems, but they were never trying to be weird or off-putting for the sake of artiness. Hell, a lot of Brutalist buildings were the most functional, utilitarian structures you can picture. This whole thing uses Brutalism as a clickbait buzzword; it has nothing to do with the principles. A web site inspired by Brutalism would consist of the elements that the designer considered core to building it and avoid anything else. If CSS is not core, don't use it and instead rely on the browser styles. If JavaScript is core to function, use it. Etc.
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago
  Describing a startup-happy billionaire-loving site like HN as "anti-bourgeois" is comical.
  - cwkoss 8y ago
    Describing any CSS style or design pattern as "anti-bourgeois" is comical.
    - DonHopkins 8y ago
      Sounds like a job for Comic Sans!
bobsondugnutt 8y ago
A lot of those sites appear Brutalist, but open up their source and you can see they are still quite bloated. So they are just going for the look. Someone posted https://wiby.me https://wiby.me on here regarding an article about old websites. This is an example of web brutalism, the site itself is basic but not ugly and there is practically nothing in the source that is going to slow down my machine. Hacker News is also a perfect example. Now one example from that article (https://theoutline.com/ https://theoutline.com/ which I picked randomly) has a 284kb CSS file in it. This is the norm, not the exception for most contemporary sites. On my phone, I don't have much data for my plan. I have to be careful just visiting websites. Literally just visiting a few websites can cause me to download hundreds of megs...
- jamestimmins 8y ago
  That sort of makes sense though, if the design trend (whether you wanna call if 'brutalism' or just the form du jour), is more focused on the aesthetic rather than how it gets built. I suspect the adherents to this type of design would consider themselves designers, not developers, and thus are less concerned with bloat and file size.
_bxg1 8y ago
Brutalism seems like the wrong comparison to make with this new wave of design. The way I see it, brutalist websites would be websites with little or no CSS (see: http://www.motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://www.motherfuckingwebsite.com/). They expose the "concrete of the web". The examples in the article seem more punk, if anything. Which, that's cool too, but different. They actually require a lot of images and really tricky CSS to create that look, even if it's intentionally chaotic.
- underwater 8y ago
  I think there is a difference between design that is deliberately raw, and something that hasn’t been designed at all.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    In this sense, brutalism is not designing at all. Brutalism was about focusing on function, with no consideration given to making it pretty for the sake of prettiness. If you treat this as a design style, you're missing the point.
- DavidVoid 8y ago
  > The examples in the article seem more punk, if anything. Some of the websites linked in the article remind me of dada collages (Hausmann's "ABCD" for example[1]), which are a usually lot more chaotic and free-form than brutalist architecture. [1] "ABCD" by Raoul Hausmann (1920). https://i.imgur.com/ksHst2C.jpg https://i.imgur.com/ksHst2C.jpg
scott113341 8y ago
This is a fun website to peruse every once in a while: http://brutalistwebsites.com/ http://brutalistwebsites.com/ Its submission from 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11517491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11517491
- tgb 8y ago
  In what ways are these "brutalist"? The first two I clicked on had (in one) music auto-playing over a video with your mouse pointer a Terminator-style claw and (in the other) a 3D animated leg that you could spin before hitting 'access' to get to the actual site. These aren't brutalist, they're the trying-too-hard-to-be-cool teenager phase. [1] http://gregroque.com/#/home http://gregroque.com/#/home [2] https://heel.zone https://heel.zone
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ttoinou 8y ago
"honest, unpretentious and anti-bourgeois" and then cites Habitat 67 in Montreal.. I thought Habitat 67 were high end
krapp 8y ago
Sorry, but unless your site is an open directory full of plain text files, it's not "brutalist."
- tfranco 8y ago
  Like an RFC?
tw1010 8y ago
Convince me this isn't just a ploy by designers to justify their existence over templates.
- cwkoss 8y ago
  "Hey, looks like your website isn't using the most cutting-edge design theory, because look at this one that I just made up"
leoc 8y ago
I'd rather that someday someone started a social-media discussion about beautiful International Style buildings https://www.bauhaus-dessau.de/im/1128x0/4521fb85f94dd85172f251a6fa3a96fe.jpg https://www.bauhaus-dessau.de/im/1128x0/4521fb85f94dd85172f2... https://www.bauhaus100.de/en/past/works/architecture/chicago-tribune-tower/ https://www.bauhaus100.de/en/past/works/architecture/chicago... instead of another round of clickbaiting with self-consciously gimmicky buildings from the fag-end of modernism.
pnathan 8y ago
this isn't brutalist, this is pretentious. the materials don't show through. the websites are ridiculously pretentious. roughness & exposed structures are likely to be problems in function. visible thought processes - logorrhea is the other term for that. or brainstorming. Neither should be put up for public view. the websites the article castigates are identical in style, but not bad, per se. they exemplify a certain aesthetic, and a cookie cutter way of design that is driven by, I think, the north European minimalism trends of the 1960s via Rams and Ives at Apple. if you want to go for a bad influence that is useful, I suggest pondering LaTeX. Textfiles. http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ . Hacker News. Possibly even the NYT or the WaPo. design that is aimed at information transmission: not ads, not branding, not razz ma tazz to tickle the eye and neglect knowledge & understanding. Alexander's concepts on architecture have much to commend themselves when considered for information transmission as well.
solidhal 8y ago
The Humanities building at the University of Wisconsin Madison is a great example of Brutalist design in my opinion. And its beautiful.
- code_duck 8y ago
  I grew up admiring the brutalist inspired buildings at UNM (the style blends nicely with adobe and Pueblo architecture). There are many in Albuquerque. The style also reminds me of late 70s science fiction art depicting spaceships and vast buildings.
saagarjha 8y ago
> Naturally, a lot of graphical and aesthetic principles ended up dictated by languages such as Google’s Material Design or Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. And I'm fine with that. Generally I'd trust Apple's guidelines a lot more than J. Random Designer's, so for those that are not willing to do a lot of work, I'd really prefer if they chose a decent guideline rather than trying to fake it themselves. Yes, I know that there are those who are great with design, and I'm not discounting them: they should be free to do what they want, but I'd like for there to be a barrier to entry. If you really know what you're doing, sure, go on ahead; otherwise, stick to the default.
jopuwep12489 8y ago
No no no. No more. No more isms. Here's the problem with web design: Nobody actually designs anything. They mindlessly copy the look of things, without giving thought to how things actually work. Examples: 1. Apple made the first iOS have references to real world items (the dropdown menus looked like rolling dials.) Makes sense because touch mobile interfaces were new, and the references gave users a clue how to interact with them. The takeaway for hack designers was to cover everything in fake wood and leather textures. 2. Some designers rightly avoided this trend, and made designs with less references to physical textures. Hack designers declared this the "flat design" trend, and proceeded to strip as much depth from their designs as possible. Now buttons were just squares, with no indication whether they could be pressed or not. There were no borders to break up featureless blobs of content. Icons were redesigned to be as minimal and abstract as possible, to the point where you couldn't tell what the icon was supposed to be. 3. Google created their own design guidelines (material design) that tried to keep the flat look while adding back some much needed affordance by way of slight shadows and animations. Hack designers mistook material design for a new trend, and made their own copy cat interfaces. A style intended to give one company a visual identity, in the hands of poor designers, made every company have the same identity. The same thing keeps happening. It will happen to web brutalism (whatever that is.) It won't change until web designers and the people who hire them start seeing the role of designers differently.
toddmorey 8y ago
Is this just a new type of monotony though? Look at the sites in these two rows from the Brutalist Websites collection (1 & 2 below). My favorite of the entire set is the ZK/U site, as it has strong borders and contrast and other elements of this new langauge, but not at the expense of being easy to use and navigate. [1] http://osscreenshots.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/bruatalist1.png http://osscreenshots.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/bruatalist1.... [2] http://osscreenshots.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/brutalist2.png http://osscreenshots.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/brutalist2.p...
rayiner 8y ago
The idea of web pages as Brutalist is ironic. Brutalism was a movement meant to not hide structural concrete or make it look like something else. The concept has no meaningful analogy on the web, where no style that showstopper the raw structure (because there is no visible structure, it’s all equally arbitrary.)
- cwkoss 8y ago
  If the user can't see the UUIDs of every object rendered on the page and you are using a non-standard font, your design probably is not very Brutalist. Brutalist UX is the apache webserver 404 page.
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  That’s just not true, HTML has natural spacing, fonts, etc. What’s the least amount of code you could possibly write that functions? That’s going to be the most “minimalist“ design. box-shadow: black is less bits of information than box-shadow: 2px 4px 0.5em 0.2em rgba(100,55, 45, 0.9)
  - rayiner 8y ago
    But those are arbitrary design choices too, just default ones. They don’t reflect the underlying functional structure of the page. Brutalist architecture is intended to reflect the functional structure of the building. That concrete is there for functional reasons; it is sized for functional reasons such as holding up the wall. Concrete is used because it’s a functionally versatile material. All that functional purpose is exposed. Brutalist web design might be something like showing the DOM without styling it. In a Lisp context, it’s be like showing raw s-expressions as output.
    - erikpukinskis 8y ago
      Sure, and the grit of clay at a specific location is arbitrary too, but if that’s the material you have to work with, then that’s the material. I think you’re being too literal about what constitutes material. You think only something the level of hardware or a programming language is “material” and everything above that is arbitrary, but I would argue ALL of the layers of the stack constitute material properties. How about this: form submission. You don’t need it... you can use Ajax. But forms that can be submitted will work in more environments (no JavaScript, forward and back navigation, etc) You can fight that current, but the underlying technology wants you to use forms. I’m not really arguing about Brutalism though, so much as modernism. A modern web page would contain a minimum of changes to what the basic simplest HTML would yield. You start from the raw material with all its idiosyncrasies and you only add a dimension of “designed stuff” when you have a specific articulable rationale for it. (This is totally different from the colloquial definition of “modern web applications” which are anything but respectful of their materials)
eecc 8y ago
So it's all about tossing around magenta printing plates and calling it a day. Meh... it looks like mocks to me, but I'm an old geezer
EGreg 8y ago
Designers have fads. Why should the rest of us care and go along with their designs trends and counter reactions? For many business minded people, it’s about what’s most useful and pleasant for our USERS, not about satisfying their collective art fetishes. PS: I miss skeumorphism and the ability to quickly differentiate content areas from controls.
iambateman 8y ago
The author made a few points I thought were odd (“web design is now brutalist, which is Neoflat but also good”) but one point that seems helpful: Graphic designers have, in fact, shrugged off individuality in favor of convention in the name of usability. Is the design universe bent toward homogeny? I mean, look at cars or houses. Is everything destined to come in 4 colors, 3 models and a trim package?
Phait 8y ago
Key points that we can take away from this article: 1. Brutalist design means having huge-ass boxes floating around, with cool animations, sans-serif fonts, all powered by 500MB of JS libraries 2. Dropbox is exactly the same as it has been for the last 10 years, they just conformed to the ubiquitous standard of modern web design, and redid their logo to be EXACTLY like the logos of all the other tech companies in the world: sans-serif font, simple stylized icon Good read. As a side node, I think that this experiment I did on my blog a while back accidentally matches the definition of brutalism better than the examples in the article: https://danielegrattarola.github.io/metaverse/ https://danielegrattarola.github.io/metaverse/
- offbytwo 8y ago
  > https://danielegrattarola.github.io/metaverse/ https://danielegrattarola.github.io/metaverse/ These are really cool, did you come up with that function for the mandelbrot set? Do you have an explaination of how it works??
thedirt0115 8y ago
Larry Wall (creator of Perl) was ahead of the curve on brutalist design :) http://www.wall.org/~larry/ http://www.wall.org/~larry/
crb002 8y ago
Homogenized is OK. Better UX that is evidence based than betting the farm on an art project.
purplezooey 8y ago
Personally I miss Brutalist buildings. We build very cheaply and flimsy now, especially in the west, with 2x4 construction where you can hear everything happening in the building. Brutalist buildings made extensive use of concrete which we should use more of.
cwkoss 8y ago
This article reads like it was written by a web designer who coined the usage of brutalism in the web space and uses it to try to sell themselves and differentiate their design work, even though their design isn't particularly unusual.
syndacks 8y ago
Perhaps a bit off topic, meta even, but the design of the copy here (which borrows from Medium) ruins the experience for me. One shouldn't have to bold text or use quote type styling to make something stand out. Write engaging prose.
lwansbrough 8y ago
I think it's possible to create visually stunning and unique designs without relying on (IMO) low quality brutalism. Take the following couple of sites as examples: https://www.designbetter.co https://www.designbetter.co https://dropbox.design https://dropbox.design I wholeheartedly agree that we should resist homogeny in product design.
sergiotapia 8y ago
Anything to get away from this boring, corporate sanctioned influence of web design! Please! The web used have identities, you KNEW you were in Vimm's lair. Now it's all the same bootstrappified muck. https://vimm.net/ https://vimm.net/ The question is, how do you convince management to allow this direction?
kroltan 8y ago
As a shameless self-plug, I was inspired by http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ for my personal website: https://kroltan.github.io/ https://kroltan.github.io/ I did not go all the way, however. The site is still 11kB plus a 16kB non-essential image. It has quite a bit more than 7 CSS declarations. I did not minify the markup like Better M* Website. Any feedback is welcome, however!
- bobsondugnutt 8y ago
  Nice work. I see you used your CSS sparingly.
blhack 8y ago
No, the "bad influence" we all need is COLOR. I am so fed up with all of this meaningless "flat" design. It's awful. Our monitors are capable of making millions of colors. An icon can be more than white. This isn't paper and you aren't paying per color.
avinium 8y ago
I've been in love with the Bloomberg redesign since it was launched, not sure I'd call it "brutalist" though. Strong/high-contrast, yes.
daleco 8y ago
The article isn’t drawing a clear line between visual design and design patterns. Many people confuse UI and UX design. One is artistic (UI), the other one is based on cognitive science (UX). UI will define the looks, the interface may be pretty or bold, but not necessarily usable and intuitive. UX design will reduce the gap between human and machine by efficiently implementing design patterns, and user centered methodologies (human factors). It’s expensive and challengjng to build a culture around design (Airbnb, Apple...) and build new patterns. It’s probably cheaper to just go Wild on the UI, not sure if that would stick though.
justonepost 8y ago
Brutalism was usually pretty functional. To compare mediocre web design to a widely respected (at least for the time) architectural movement is reaching.
spyckie2 8y ago
Here's a novel thought: maybe we're following Google and Apple's design frameworks because those frameworks provide the best ease of use, consistency, predictability, and usability to designers, which is the point of good UX? People who don't appreciate these things don't understand user experience applies to the process of design too? I get that there's a point to individualism, being trendy, hip, new and having a brand. But to be brutally honest, brands these days are created through spoken narratives with their actions, their storytelling, and their advertising. I think most skilled designers learned that long ago - it's much more efficient to speak through the traditional mediums of color, graphics, stories, and text. You have to do a ton of work to create your own look and feel framework (most of it involving robust layouting, consistency, and thinking through a ton of edge cases - read the material docs from cover to cover to get a sense of how much decision making it is). While doing this, you have to balance both branding AND UX decisions(!). Sticking to using graphics, color, and text separates a lot of the branding vs UX concerns, and is much simpler to reason. Unless you're a rock band or a creative agency, creating a novel new page styling is simply an inefficient use of time and money.
- bitexploder 8y ago
  Not gonna sugar coat it. HTML and CSS are basically Bootstrap for me. I know how to tweak it and make responsive design with it. It is functional for my own projects. It is easy to tweak it to at least give a little distinction to my UI. I know the basics of UX and it's easy enough to do. Why spin my wheels dealing with going deeper when I just want UI that works as a non-designer.
HummusGhost 8y ago
Can we just all admit that we miss the <blink> tag and move on?
HelloNurse 8y ago
Brutalist architecture mainly involves raw concrete, proudly exhibiting the modern construction technology of its time instead of pretending to be something else, and more generally avoiding pointless ornament and complication. It makes sense in architecture, but a similar style in web design doesn't: all web design proudly embraces high tech by its nature, even the simplest examples; ornament can only be simulated, without craftsmanship and actual complication (compare a CSS box border, represented by a few number and implicitly existing even when invisible, with a plaster frame around a door); structures are always simple and evident, differing only in taste. The point the article tries to make (escaping horribly homogeneous industry trends, with the advantage of having some identity) is valid but unrelated to brutalist architecture. Looking at http://brutalistwebsites.com/ http://brutalistwebsites.com/ I see an inconsistent roundup of web design that, since it departs from the mainstream style ("mobile-first", short text, rectangles, centering,...) can be automatically considered relatively cool. In reality, there are many styles represented: actually mainstream, but accidentally good; glitchy and rough and strange, as traditional for designers showing off; revival of the "Swiss" typographic style that went hand in hand with middle-late brutalist architecture and is somewhat contrary to current trends (close spacing, balanced and regular 2D layout, non-hipster fonts); camp or spiteful imitations of antique and/or aberrant ugly web pages; not self conscious, merely simple and functional.
tree_of_item 8y ago
I want everything to look the same. Terminal apps all look the same, Emacs "apps" all look the same. When things look different it's hard to tell what the hell is going on, and for what? So your stupid brand can advertise more efficiently? I don't care, I want to do whatever it is the app is supposed to do. So I'll pass on this brutal nonsense, thanks.
- keithpeter 8y ago
  We lost that when the gopher protocol went away. I was hopefull about RSS for a bit but then they started just pushing a tag line or summary... ...I take it you have tried local style sheets (or w3m)
hypertexthero 8y ago
I agree with the premise of the article, but maybe [simple][1] is a better term than brutalist for [good web design][2]. Brutalist architecture is only rarely not ugly while simple buildings are often beautiful. Here’s to more variety and diversity on the web! [1]: http://s3.amazonaws.com/simpleuseful/index.html http://s3.amazonaws.com/simpleuseful/index.html [2]: https://www.simongriffee.com/notebook/web-design-where-to-begin/ https://www.simongriffee.com/notebook/web-design-where-to-be...
thomastodon 8y ago
These websites are not of a brutalist style. Habitat 67 and the like, while having a plain aesthetic, never did so at any expense of their user's ability to find their way around. These websites are relatively incomprehensible, and categorically closer to deconstructivist than brutalist. A raised material design button is not ornate, it is plain and simple way to propose an action to a user.

335 points by vanni 8y ago

Reminds me of the Adbusters Magazine I used to read as a kid. Philosophically and aesthetically brutalist and uncomfortable.

kolpa 8y ago
What does "Philosophically and aesthetically brutalist and uncomfortable." mean?
- forkLding 8y ago
  Will understand when you pick one up by accident at a local library if they have it, its very aesthetically well done but also usually uncomfortable content Example: https://adbusters.org/ https://adbusters.org/
Chaebixi 8y ago
Adbusters Magazine is the epitome of style over substance.

pkamb 8y ago

I was blown away by the new Northwest Film Forum website: https://nwfilmforum.org/ https://nwfilmforum.org/ Also, a link to Brutalism worth protecting of the concrete variety: http://www.sosbrutalism.org/cms/15802395 http://www.sosbrutalism.org/cms/15802395

jboles 8y ago
Sadly the Sirius building is likely to be torn down :-(
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
nugi 8y ago
1st link, 'javascript is required'. Brutal indeed.

tomc1985 8y ago

And yet for all its supposed innovation, web brutalistism still looks overly pretentious as it revels in its 'aesthetic' of psuedo-Swiss minimalism. I'm sick of the garbage that designers these days pass off as 'form'. It ruins computing. Sci-fi showed us the future was large screens full of data and smart humans doing meaningful shit with it... but reality is we pay beaucorp bucks to waste 98% of a 4K, 9-megapixel display on a royal purple background with a couple of words in white.

mnemonicsloth 8y ago
Beaucorp! What a great new word. One of the world-spanning megacorporations from William Gibson but decorated in a Beaux-Arts style.
- tomc1985 8y ago
  It's an old word, afaik. Means 'mega' in this context. Also I mispelled it :D
  - khedoros1 8y ago
    I think they know that, and were riffing off the misspelling ;-) It's about an 800 year old word in French. Wiktionary claims that it was imported to US English primarily by GIs returning from the Vietnam War. I'd assume that it would come more directly from French, in other forms of English.
    - code_duck 8y ago
      I recall this being brought up by a guy who had been a helicopter mechanic in the Army... he believed it was a Vietnamese word spelled ‘buku’, and it took me some time to realize he meant beaucoup. Example in context: “They’re making buku bucks over there.”
      - khedoros1 8y ago
        My father was in the Marine Corps; about a decade too young for Vietnam, but I kind of assume he picked it up from Marines who'd been in the service at the appropriate time. From my perspective, for a long time it was just another one of those weird-sounding words that only Dad used (which turned out to be French, German, and Spanish).

wffurr 8y ago

Please no. Branding through UX is bad UX. Simple, reliable, transferrable, easy to understand UX is good UX. Not everything has to be a billboard. I don't want a hammer where the handle is an iron rod embossed with the maker's logo. I just want an ergonomic wooden handle that does the job.

Chaebixi 8y ago
> Please no. Branding through UX is bad UX. I agree. > Simple, ..., transferrable, easy to understand UX is good UX. I disagree. I think the first part of OP raised some good points. The copy everyone's copying and that everyone understand may just be an inferior local maxima. I think this podcast gets at some of the lost potential: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/of-mice-and-men/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/of-mice-and-men/
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > I disagree. I think the first part of OP raised some good points. The copy everyone's copying and that everyone understand may just be an inferior local maxima. Yup. But the way out of those inferior local maxima is by focusing on making UX more "simple, reliable, easy to understand". By focusing on being different and expressing your brand identity, you go towards even worse state than the local maximum you're trying to escape.

gweinberg 8y ago

Sounds to me more like a terrible idea that nobody needs.

master_ant 8y ago

I'm starting to get tired of the cookie-cutter Bootstrap and Squarespace templates taking over the web. This is a refreshing read, I like the comparisons it makes to brutalism in architecture.

kolpa 8y ago
It's backwards, though, because Bootstrap and Squarespace are Brutalist (to whatever extent that word really applies to the web at all): cheap, egalitarian, and simple to use.
- spking 8y ago
  Correct. Bootstrap is the IKEA of frontend frameworks. Simple, predictable, cheap/free, and easy enough for almost anyone to pick up and build with.

Rotdhizon 8y ago

I was impressed with the brutalist architecture, those plain concrete buildings have something about them that I can't place. Maybe like the old concrete tower hovering over the backdrop of a new, colorful, city? Something about it peeks your senses. As for the web design, it was also interesting. I liked some of the designs, others not so much. The website for zku: http://www.zku-berlin.org http://www.zku-berlin.org Something about that just feels comforting, if not nostalgic, like what you'd expect to see from an early 2000s webpage before things got fancy. I think what makes these sites pop for me is the contrast of colors, too much white ruins the effect. Having out of place, darker colors thrown in feels like its breaking the rules, in a good way.

kaiby 8y ago
I thought the same thing: when I first went to that site, I immediately thought, "I could've sworn I had made a site that looked like this back in the late 90’s..."
mhink 8y ago
> Something about that just feels comforting, if not nostalgic, like what you'd expect to see from an early 2000s webpage before things got fancy. I think what makes these sites pop for me is the contrast of colors, too much white ruins the effect. Having out of place, darker colors thrown in feels like its breaking the rules, in a good way. To me, the page feels like a Geocities site that "grew up"- in a good way. The "chunkiness" of the element borders reminds me of the traditional default styling of <table> elements. You're also spot on with the contrast: I just checked, and this site's design is based on only three colors: #fff, #000, and #ff0. That's a pretty bold design statement, and they pull it off.
sporkologist 8y ago
It's refreshing seeing a site without a mystery-meat UI.

simplify 8y ago

Most web design trends since the 90s have been progressive. Brutalism feels like a step backwards for the sake of being different. Feels like one of those trends that will be very short-lived.

digi_owl 8y ago

When i think web-brutalism i do not think of anything illustrated in this article. I think of (old) Reddit, Craigslist, this very "forum", and similar ones that are mostly text with minimal/no JS or graphics.

hammerandtongs 8y ago
Yes this article seems to be redefining "web brutalism" to be a simple recoloring of the same wretched over designed unusable webpages that "web brutalism" was a reaction to.
tzahola 8y ago
This. Brutalism is inherently utilitarian. Content over presentation. IETF RFCs are brutalist.
- tfranco 8y ago
  Won the internet
cpeterso 8y ago
The Drudge Report is another good example of a brutalist, content-over-presentation website.

deepakkarki 8y ago

The brutalist style works when it is the right design for the job, just shoehorning it for the sake of "design aesthetics" makes no sense. In fact it would work great for HN style webpages. I run something similar - DiscoverDev ( https://discoverdev.io https://discoverdev.io ) and got a lot of compliments on the "brutalist design". Then again it is a minimilist site, I really doubt this would work well for larger applications.

kaiby 8y ago

I actually really like the usage of borders in these "brutalist" designs. Current design trends seem to minimize or eliminate borders altogether, which makes it hard to visually separate content, which makes it hard for users to find the content they want. I thought I could browse through the text on these new sites faster because the borders were so much more prominent [0]. I think the random placement of links is a tricky thing though. One one hand it brings identity to your brand, but on the other hand, it’s not intuitive for the user. [0] http://www.zku-berlin.org/ http://www.zku-berlin.org/, pkamb below also linked https://nwfilmforum.org/ https://nwfilmforum.org/

deleted 8y ago
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krrrh 8y ago
In the late nineties I had the impression that Shepard Fairey’s original Mozilla logo really set the tone for thick border design. So many influential web designers frequently spent time on the site, and it felt like a thousand thick border stylesheets bloomed across the web for a few years. https://web.archive.org/web/20000229231038/http://www.mozilla.org:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000229231038/http://www.mozill...

tzahola 8y ago

These people are conflating brutalism with postmodernism. A brutalist website would be one without a stylesheet, or a simple txt file rendered in monospace. These are just websites that go out of their way to be ugly and unusable. Nothing to do with brutalism, and more to do with pretentious art school graduates ruminating on the critical theory of intersectional webdesign or some other bullshit.

smacktoward 8y ago

I'm confused. I don't see what makes most of the examples cited here "Brutalist" in any meaningful fashion. Brutalism is, of course, a fuzzy (and contentious) label to begin with. But the article cites two interpretations of the term that we could use to evaluate how Brutalist a given design is: honest, unpretentious and anti-bourgeois and a sense of roughness, exposed structures and visible thought processes The problem is, I'm not seeing a lot of either of these in the examples provided. If you asked me to name a site whose design is "honest, unpretentious and anti-bourgeois," for instance, examples that would leap to my mind are Craigslist and HN -- both of which focus on simple (even drab) layouts dominated by plain old text. But the examples are full of vibrant colors, big images and irregular, unconventional layouts! They're refreshing and interesting to look at, but that doesn't make them Brutalist. And to the other definition, "exposed structures and visible thought processes," I'd point to... well, I'm not sure what I'd point to. I'm not sure there is any web site that would qualify as Brutalist by this definition. Are there any sites that let their plumbing hang conspicuously out on the sides? Bloomberg and Dropbox and the Outline certainly don't. I'd think of this more as a site where you interact with it via an API or the developer console or some heavy, overwhelming user interface than as a news site that happens to have decided to use giant fonts and screaming neon colors. If we want to have Brutalism as a valid design approach for the web, we first need to decide on what exactly the word means. Otherwise it will just become a parking lot for whatever trends happen to be fashionable at the moment, which is not a great way to build something that will make a lasting impact.

sagichmal 8y ago
Brutalist design encompasses both Craigslist and these examples. There are commonalities there, as well as differences.
- throwaway2048 8y ago
  such as?
- dangerbird2 8y ago
  Also Wikipedia and a certain tech-centric online forum, to an extent.

cschmidt 8y ago

I guess I'm missing the connection on those websites to Brutalist architecture. It seems more like they're bored with regular design, and want to be more experimental. It reminds conceptually more of Emigre magazine [1] or Ray Gun [2], where the design didn't have to be "readable". [1] https://www.emigre.com/Magazine [2] http://www.davidcarsondesign.com/t/tag/raygun/

quantumofmalice 8y ago

Archived link since the site has been, ahem, brutalized: https://archive.fo/3W7yY https://archive.fo/3W7yY There isn't really an argument for brutalism except laziness and the usual contempt the design community has for its end users. Minimalism has its place, as does maximalism, depending on the context within the application. But that requires actual thinking and then both taste and skill, respectively. Much easier to just wallow in contempt with occasional outbursts of sarcastic novelty, as architecture has done for the last sixty years.

tfranco 8y ago
Whas the site down?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

robeastham 8y ago

Original article currently offline for me and so I found it here: https://web.archive.org/web/20180413180014/https://www.imaginarycloud.com/blog/why-we-need-web-brutalism/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180413180014/https://www.imagi...

SlapHappy 8y ago

I think HN is better example of "brutalist" web design than most of the examples. Plain typefaces and colors, rigid lines and block-y structures. As for the bit about brutalism being "honest, unpretentious and anti-bourgeois" - LOL - the only people who actually rave about it as an aesthetic are the most pretentious people I know (not that there's anything wrong w/ that).

Semiapies 8y ago
And "challenging" people or making them "uncomfortable" was never what the Brutalists were trying to do. They were utopians trying to build useful, life-improving structures unhampered by convention and superficial decoration. Any aesthetics had to come from the fundamental design and undisguised materials. Their designs often had a lot of practical problems, but they were never trying to be weird or off-putting for the sake of artiness. Hell, a lot of Brutalist buildings were the most functional, utilitarian structures you can picture. This whole thing uses Brutalism as a clickbait buzzword; it has nothing to do with the principles. A web site inspired by Brutalism would consist of the elements that the designer considered core to building it and avoid anything else. If CSS is not core, don't use it and instead rely on the browser styles. If JavaScript is core to function, use it. Etc.
eeZah7Ux 8y ago
Describing a startup-happy billionaire-loving site like HN as "anti-bourgeois" is comical.
- cwkoss 8y ago
  Describing any CSS style or design pattern as "anti-bourgeois" is comical.
  - DonHopkins 8y ago
    Sounds like a job for Comic Sans!

bobsondugnutt 8y ago

A lot of those sites appear Brutalist, but open up their source and you can see they are still quite bloated. So they are just going for the look. Someone posted https://wiby.me https://wiby.me on here regarding an article about old websites. This is an example of web brutalism, the site itself is basic but not ugly and there is practically nothing in the source that is going to slow down my machine. Hacker News is also a perfect example. Now one example from that article (https://theoutline.com/ https://theoutline.com/ which I picked randomly) has a 284kb CSS file in it. This is the norm, not the exception for most contemporary sites. On my phone, I don't have much data for my plan. I have to be careful just visiting websites. Literally just visiting a few websites can cause me to download hundreds of megs...

jamestimmins 8y ago
That sort of makes sense though, if the design trend (whether you wanna call if 'brutalism' or just the form du jour), is more focused on the aesthetic rather than how it gets built. I suspect the adherents to this type of design would consider themselves designers, not developers, and thus are less concerned with bloat and file size.

_bxg1 8y ago

Brutalism seems like the wrong comparison to make with this new wave of design. The way I see it, brutalist websites would be websites with little or no CSS (see: http://www.motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://www.motherfuckingwebsite.com/). They expose the "concrete of the web". The examples in the article seem more punk, if anything. Which, that's cool too, but different. They actually require a lot of images and really tricky CSS to create that look, even if it's intentionally chaotic.

underwater 8y ago
I think there is a difference between design that is deliberately raw, and something that hasn’t been designed at all.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  In this sense, brutalism is not designing at all. Brutalism was about focusing on function, with no consideration given to making it pretty for the sake of prettiness. If you treat this as a design style, you're missing the point.
DavidVoid 8y ago
> The examples in the article seem more punk, if anything. Some of the websites linked in the article remind me of dada collages (Hausmann's "ABCD" for example[1]), which are a usually lot more chaotic and free-form than brutalist architecture. [1] "ABCD" by Raoul Hausmann (1920). https://i.imgur.com/ksHst2C.jpg https://i.imgur.com/ksHst2C.jpg

scott113341 8y ago

This is a fun website to peruse every once in a while: http://brutalistwebsites.com/ http://brutalistwebsites.com/ Its submission from 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11517491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11517491

tgb 8y ago
In what ways are these "brutalist"? The first two I clicked on had (in one) music auto-playing over a video with your mouse pointer a Terminator-style claw and (in the other) a 3D animated leg that you could spin before hitting 'access' to get to the actual site. These aren't brutalist, they're the trying-too-hard-to-be-cool teenager phase. [1] http://gregroque.com/#/home http://gregroque.com/#/home [2] https://heel.zone https://heel.zone

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ttoinou 8y ago

"honest, unpretentious and anti-bourgeois" and then cites Habitat 67 in Montreal.. I thought Habitat 67 were high end

krapp 8y ago

Sorry, but unless your site is an open directory full of plain text files, it's not "brutalist."

tfranco 8y ago
Like an RFC?

tw1010 8y ago

Convince me this isn't just a ploy by designers to justify their existence over templates.

cwkoss 8y ago
"Hey, looks like your website isn't using the most cutting-edge design theory, because look at this one that I just made up"

leoc 8y ago

I'd rather that someday someone started a social-media discussion about beautiful International Style buildings https://www.bauhaus-dessau.de/im/1128x0/4521fb85f94dd85172f251a6fa3a96fe.jpg https://www.bauhaus-dessau.de/im/1128x0/4521fb85f94dd85172f2... https://www.bauhaus100.de/en/past/works/architecture/chicago-tribune-tower/ https://www.bauhaus100.de/en/past/works/architecture/chicago... instead of another round of clickbaiting with self-consciously gimmicky buildings from the fag-end of modernism.

pnathan 8y ago

this isn't brutalist, this is pretentious. the materials don't show through. the websites are ridiculously pretentious. roughness & exposed structures are likely to be problems in function. visible thought processes - logorrhea is the other term for that. or brainstorming. Neither should be put up for public view. the websites the article castigates are identical in style, but not bad, per se. they exemplify a certain aesthetic, and a cookie cutter way of design that is driven by, I think, the north European minimalism trends of the 1960s via Rams and Ives at Apple. if you want to go for a bad influence that is useful, I suggest pondering LaTeX. Textfiles. http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ . Hacker News. Possibly even the NYT or the WaPo. design that is aimed at information transmission: not ads, not branding, not razz ma tazz to tickle the eye and neglect knowledge & understanding. Alexander's concepts on architecture have much to commend themselves when considered for information transmission as well.

solidhal 8y ago

The Humanities building at the University of Wisconsin Madison is a great example of Brutalist design in my opinion. And its beautiful.

code_duck 8y ago
I grew up admiring the brutalist inspired buildings at UNM (the style blends nicely with adobe and Pueblo architecture). There are many in Albuquerque. The style also reminds me of late 70s science fiction art depicting spaceships and vast buildings.

saagarjha 8y ago

> Naturally, a lot of graphical and aesthetic principles ended up dictated by languages such as Google’s Material Design or Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. And I'm fine with that. Generally I'd trust Apple's guidelines a lot more than J. Random Designer's, so for those that are not willing to do a lot of work, I'd really prefer if they chose a decent guideline rather than trying to fake it themselves. Yes, I know that there are those who are great with design, and I'm not discounting them: they should be free to do what they want, but I'd like for there to be a barrier to entry. If you really know what you're doing, sure, go on ahead; otherwise, stick to the default.

jopuwep12489 8y ago

No no no. No more. No more isms. Here's the problem with web design: Nobody actually designs anything. They mindlessly copy the look of things, without giving thought to how things actually work. Examples: 1. Apple made the first iOS have references to real world items (the dropdown menus looked like rolling dials.) Makes sense because touch mobile interfaces were new, and the references gave users a clue how to interact with them. The takeaway for hack designers was to cover everything in fake wood and leather textures. 2. Some designers rightly avoided this trend, and made designs with less references to physical textures. Hack designers declared this the "flat design" trend, and proceeded to strip as much depth from their designs as possible. Now buttons were just squares, with no indication whether they could be pressed or not. There were no borders to break up featureless blobs of content. Icons were redesigned to be as minimal and abstract as possible, to the point where you couldn't tell what the icon was supposed to be. 3. Google created their own design guidelines (material design) that tried to keep the flat look while adding back some much needed affordance by way of slight shadows and animations. Hack designers mistook material design for a new trend, and made their own copy cat interfaces. A style intended to give one company a visual identity, in the hands of poor designers, made every company have the same identity. The same thing keeps happening. It will happen to web brutalism (whatever that is.) It won't change until web designers and the people who hire them start seeing the role of designers differently.

toddmorey 8y ago

Is this just a new type of monotony though? Look at the sites in these two rows from the Brutalist Websites collection (1 & 2 below). My favorite of the entire set is the ZK/U site, as it has strong borders and contrast and other elements of this new langauge, but not at the expense of being easy to use and navigate. [1] http://osscreenshots.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/bruatalist1.png http://osscreenshots.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/bruatalist1.... [2] http://osscreenshots.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/brutalist2.png http://osscreenshots.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/brutalist2.p...

rayiner 8y ago

The idea of web pages as Brutalist is ironic. Brutalism was a movement meant to not hide structural concrete or make it look like something else. The concept has no meaningful analogy on the web, where no style that showstopper the raw structure (because there is no visible structure, it’s all equally arbitrary.)

cwkoss 8y ago
If the user can't see the UUIDs of every object rendered on the page and you are using a non-standard font, your design probably is not very Brutalist. Brutalist UX is the apache webserver 404 page.
erikpukinskis 8y ago
That’s just not true, HTML has natural spacing, fonts, etc. What’s the least amount of code you could possibly write that functions? That’s going to be the most “minimalist“ design. box-shadow: black is less bits of information than box-shadow: 2px 4px 0.5em 0.2em rgba(100,55, 45, 0.9)
- rayiner 8y ago
  But those are arbitrary design choices too, just default ones. They don’t reflect the underlying functional structure of the page. Brutalist architecture is intended to reflect the functional structure of the building. That concrete is there for functional reasons; it is sized for functional reasons such as holding up the wall. Concrete is used because it’s a functionally versatile material. All that functional purpose is exposed. Brutalist web design might be something like showing the DOM without styling it. In a Lisp context, it’s be like showing raw s-expressions as output.
  - erikpukinskis 8y ago
    Sure, and the grit of clay at a specific location is arbitrary too, but if that’s the material you have to work with, then that’s the material. I think you’re being too literal about what constitutes material. You think only something the level of hardware or a programming language is “material” and everything above that is arbitrary, but I would argue ALL of the layers of the stack constitute material properties. How about this: form submission. You don’t need it... you can use Ajax. But forms that can be submitted will work in more environments (no JavaScript, forward and back navigation, etc) You can fight that current, but the underlying technology wants you to use forms. I’m not really arguing about Brutalism though, so much as modernism. A modern web page would contain a minimum of changes to what the basic simplest HTML would yield. You start from the raw material with all its idiosyncrasies and you only add a dimension of “designed stuff” when you have a specific articulable rationale for it. (This is totally different from the colloquial definition of “modern web applications” which are anything but respectful of their materials)

eecc 8y ago

So it's all about tossing around magenta printing plates and calling it a day. Meh... it looks like mocks to me, but I'm an old geezer

EGreg 8y ago

Designers have fads. Why should the rest of us care and go along with their designs trends and counter reactions? For many business minded people, it’s about what’s most useful and pleasant for our USERS, not about satisfying their collective art fetishes. PS: I miss skeumorphism and the ability to quickly differentiate content areas from controls.

iambateman 8y ago

The author made a few points I thought were odd (“web design is now brutalist, which is Neoflat but also good”) but one point that seems helpful: Graphic designers have, in fact, shrugged off individuality in favor of convention in the name of usability. Is the design universe bent toward homogeny? I mean, look at cars or houses. Is everything destined to come in 4 colors, 3 models and a trim package?

Phait 8y ago

Key points that we can take away from this article: 1. Brutalist design means having huge-ass boxes floating around, with cool animations, sans-serif fonts, all powered by 500MB of JS libraries 2. Dropbox is exactly the same as it has been for the last 10 years, they just conformed to the ubiquitous standard of modern web design, and redid their logo to be EXACTLY like the logos of all the other tech companies in the world: sans-serif font, simple stylized icon Good read. As a side node, I think that this experiment I did on my blog a while back accidentally matches the definition of brutalism better than the examples in the article: https://danielegrattarola.github.io/metaverse/ https://danielegrattarola.github.io/metaverse/

offbytwo 8y ago
> https://danielegrattarola.github.io/metaverse/ https://danielegrattarola.github.io/metaverse/ These are really cool, did you come up with that function for the mandelbrot set? Do you have an explaination of how it works??

thedirt0115 8y ago

Larry Wall (creator of Perl) was ahead of the curve on brutalist design :) http://www.wall.org/~larry/ http://www.wall.org/~larry/

crb002 8y ago

Homogenized is OK. Better UX that is evidence based than betting the farm on an art project.

purplezooey 8y ago

Personally I miss Brutalist buildings. We build very cheaply and flimsy now, especially in the west, with 2x4 construction where you can hear everything happening in the building. Brutalist buildings made extensive use of concrete which we should use more of.

cwkoss 8y ago

This article reads like it was written by a web designer who coined the usage of brutalism in the web space and uses it to try to sell themselves and differentiate their design work, even though their design isn't particularly unusual.

syndacks 8y ago

Perhaps a bit off topic, meta even, but the design of the copy here (which borrows from Medium) ruins the experience for me. One shouldn't have to bold text or use quote type styling to make something stand out. Write engaging prose.

lwansbrough 8y ago

I think it's possible to create visually stunning and unique designs without relying on (IMO) low quality brutalism. Take the following couple of sites as examples: https://www.designbetter.co https://www.designbetter.co https://dropbox.design https://dropbox.design I wholeheartedly agree that we should resist homogeny in product design.

sergiotapia 8y ago

Anything to get away from this boring, corporate sanctioned influence of web design! Please! The web used have identities, you KNEW you were in Vimm's lair. Now it's all the same bootstrappified muck. https://vimm.net/ https://vimm.net/ The question is, how do you convince management to allow this direction?

kroltan 8y ago

As a shameless self-plug, I was inspired by http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ for my personal website: https://kroltan.github.io/ https://kroltan.github.io/ I did not go all the way, however. The site is still 11kB plus a 16kB non-essential image. It has quite a bit more than 7 CSS declarations. I did not minify the markup like Better M* Website. Any feedback is welcome, however!

bobsondugnutt 8y ago
Nice work. I see you used your CSS sparingly.

blhack 8y ago

No, the "bad influence" we all need is COLOR. I am so fed up with all of this meaningless "flat" design. It's awful. Our monitors are capable of making millions of colors. An icon can be more than white. This isn't paper and you aren't paying per color.

avinium 8y ago

I've been in love with the Bloomberg redesign since it was launched, not sure I'd call it "brutalist" though. Strong/high-contrast, yes.

daleco 8y ago

The article isn’t drawing a clear line between visual design and design patterns. Many people confuse UI and UX design. One is artistic (UI), the other one is based on cognitive science (UX). UI will define the looks, the interface may be pretty or bold, but not necessarily usable and intuitive. UX design will reduce the gap between human and machine by efficiently implementing design patterns, and user centered methodologies (human factors). It’s expensive and challengjng to build a culture around design (Airbnb, Apple...) and build new patterns. It’s probably cheaper to just go Wild on the UI, not sure if that would stick though.

justonepost 8y ago

Brutalism was usually pretty functional. To compare mediocre web design to a widely respected (at least for the time) architectural movement is reaching.

spyckie2 8y ago

Here's a novel thought: maybe we're following Google and Apple's design frameworks because those frameworks provide the best ease of use, consistency, predictability, and usability to designers, which is the point of good UX? People who don't appreciate these things don't understand user experience applies to the process of design too? I get that there's a point to individualism, being trendy, hip, new and having a brand. But to be brutally honest, brands these days are created through spoken narratives with their actions, their storytelling, and their advertising. I think most skilled designers learned that long ago - it's much more efficient to speak through the traditional mediums of color, graphics, stories, and text. You have to do a ton of work to create your own look and feel framework (most of it involving robust layouting, consistency, and thinking through a ton of edge cases - read the material docs from cover to cover to get a sense of how much decision making it is). While doing this, you have to balance both branding AND UX decisions(!). Sticking to using graphics, color, and text separates a lot of the branding vs UX concerns, and is much simpler to reason. Unless you're a rock band or a creative agency, creating a novel new page styling is simply an inefficient use of time and money.

bitexploder 8y ago
Not gonna sugar coat it. HTML and CSS are basically Bootstrap for me. I know how to tweak it and make responsive design with it. It is functional for my own projects. It is easy to tweak it to at least give a little distinction to my UI. I know the basics of UX and it's easy enough to do. Why spin my wheels dealing with going deeper when I just want UI that works as a non-designer.

HummusGhost 8y ago

Can we just all admit that we miss the <blink> tag and move on?

HelloNurse 8y ago

Brutalist architecture mainly involves raw concrete, proudly exhibiting the modern construction technology of its time instead of pretending to be something else, and more generally avoiding pointless ornament and complication. It makes sense in architecture, but a similar style in web design doesn't: all web design proudly embraces high tech by its nature, even the simplest examples; ornament can only be simulated, without craftsmanship and actual complication (compare a CSS box border, represented by a few number and implicitly existing even when invisible, with a plaster frame around a door); structures are always simple and evident, differing only in taste. The point the article tries to make (escaping horribly homogeneous industry trends, with the advantage of having some identity) is valid but unrelated to brutalist architecture. Looking at http://brutalistwebsites.com/ http://brutalistwebsites.com/ I see an inconsistent roundup of web design that, since it departs from the mainstream style ("mobile-first", short text, rectangles, centering,...) can be automatically considered relatively cool. In reality, there are many styles represented: actually mainstream, but accidentally good; glitchy and rough and strange, as traditional for designers showing off; revival of the "Swiss" typographic style that went hand in hand with middle-late brutalist architecture and is somewhat contrary to current trends (close spacing, balanced and regular 2D layout, non-hipster fonts); camp or spiteful imitations of antique and/or aberrant ugly web pages; not self conscious, merely simple and functional.

tree_of_item 8y ago

I want everything to look the same. Terminal apps all look the same, Emacs "apps" all look the same. When things look different it's hard to tell what the hell is going on, and for what? So your stupid brand can advertise more efficiently? I don't care, I want to do whatever it is the app is supposed to do. So I'll pass on this brutal nonsense, thanks.

keithpeter 8y ago
We lost that when the gopher protocol went away. I was hopefull about RSS for a bit but then they started just pushing a tag line or summary... ...I take it you have tried local style sheets (or w3m)

hypertexthero 8y ago

I agree with the premise of the article, but maybe [simple][1] is a better term than brutalist for [good web design][2]. Brutalist architecture is only rarely not ugly while simple buildings are often beautiful. Here’s to more variety and diversity on the web! [1]: http://s3.amazonaws.com/simpleuseful/index.html http://s3.amazonaws.com/simpleuseful/index.html [2]: https://www.simongriffee.com/notebook/web-design-where-to-begin/ https://www.simongriffee.com/notebook/web-design-where-to-be...

thomastodon 8y ago

These websites are not of a brutalist style. Habitat 67 and the like, while having a plain aesthetic, never did so at any expense of their user's ability to find their way around. These websites are relatively incomprehensible, and categorically closer to deconstructivist than brutalist. A raised material design button is not ornate, it is plain and simple way to propose an action to a user.