
The hottest trend in web design is making intentionally ugly, difficult sites - dmitriz
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/05/09/the-hottest-trend-in-web-design-is-intentionally-ugly-unusable-sites/
======
qopp
The article is just recapping the description of and linking to this site:

[http://brutalistwebsites.com](http://brutalistwebsites.com)

Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11517491](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11517491)

~~~
basch
[https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-report-
is...](https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-report-is-one-of-
the-best-designed-sites-on-the-web)

------
Springtime
> _Look at Hacker News. Pinboard. The Drudge Report. Adult Swim. Bloomberg
> Businessweek features. All of these sites [...] eschew the templated, user-
> friendly interfaces [...] Instead they’re built on imperfect, hand-coded
> HTML and take their design cues from ’90s graphics._

There's a major difference between sites like HN and Pinboard to the Adult
Swim and the Bloomberg sites linked. The former are functionally
straightforward and lacking 'flair' while the latter are merely visually
styled after a quasi-90s-esque aesthetic and are attention-seeking. It's
what's trending in design currently.

It's not the first time we've seen stripped down designs/ethos for sites in
recent years. Around 2010 or so I can remember a slew of blogs with designs
similar to the Drudge Report and such. A very neat purely text file based CMS
named Stacey [1] practically made it a core part of the design process.

[1] [http://www.staceyapp.com/](http://www.staceyapp.com/)

------
ailox
This site pulls in 6750,83 KB of data assets and scripts. It has disables the
shortcut for the developer tools, and fullscreen-prompts me to give them an
email address to read the article. without the option to skip, of course.

I am convinced this is not good web design either.

~~~
cvandijk
It disables most other shortcuts too. No fullscreen (F11), no "new tab"
(Ctrl+T), no tab-jumping between links and input elements. I usually browse
without using a mouse and suddenly got trapped inside this article, since they
also disabled "close tab" (Ctrl+W)

~~~
nitrogen
I absolutely detest the fact that browsers allow overriding core keyboard
shortcuts.

~~~
kagamine
I detest the fact that the browser uses the F-keys for its own shortcuts. We
have an a web-app ported from a mainframe app that uses the F-keys for
functions the _user_ carries out and users love being able to press F1 through
F12 to activate buttons and other page elements. Familiar users can navigate
throughout a complex app without the mouse and without continuous, repetitive
tabbing.

Overriding the browser should absolutely be allowed.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
For _some_ things, sure. No excuse for being able to override to the extent
that you can't leave a site without plugging a mouse in. Maybe, _maybe_ , that
could be allowed with an up-front confirmation dialog, but definitely not
forced.

~~~
kagamine
It comes down to use. The behavior you describe is infuriating and bad-
practice. I think we are both right.

------
WalterBright
I frequently get harangued for having "outdated" web designs, but I like them,
they are simple and load fast, such as:

[http://www.digitalmars.com/articles/index.html](http://www.digitalmars.com/articles/index.html)

~~~
jbb555
Your websites are amongst the best. They load fast, contain the information
you want, and you don't have to scroll through megabytes of random junk
looking for something useful. The d forums are amongst the fastest and most
useable websites I've seen in a long time.

~~~
unsignedqword
Honestly, the new DLang forum design is probably one of the best looking
online forums out there. Also IIRC the backend was written in D from scratch;
certainly gives the language lot of credit given its speed

~~~
WalterBright
I'd love to take the credit for the forum software, but it belongs to Vladimir
Panteleev. I had ranted on the D newsgroups now and then everything I hated
about modern forum software (in response to the perennial question "why use
NNTP when there's all these great forum software packages?"), and Vladimir
took it to heart and created the D forum software!

Probably the only case where my incessant whining actually paid off.

I did write a formatter for the newsgroup postings to turn them into web
pages, but it is read only, and doesn't look as good as Vladimir's:

[http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/index.ht...](http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/index.html)

------
jl6
I was fully expecting this to be about websites which are 30% content, 50%
advert, 20% broken, with subscribe-to-my-newsletter popups, clickbait links in
the middle of the "content", and the final third of the page inaccessible
until you sign into Facebook and complete a short survey.

And Hacker News is one of the ugly, difficult ones?

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

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

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

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

~~~
dmitriz
Having line-height: 1.6 on HN would go a long way in terms of readability.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
Apparently (I can't check right now), HN uses 'line-height: normal'. If that's
not readable for you, complain to your browser vendor; they can interpret that
value however they want. And, in some ways, it's preferable to specifying a
fixed value; it can - and should - be optimised for the specific font. I'm not
sure whether the spec allows it, but - in theory - your browser could also
optimise 'normal' for line-length.

~~~
dmitriz
Yes, it is set to `normal`. It is reasonably readable but not excessively
reasonably ;)

I don't think browser vendors are the right people to blame though. Their job
is to give the designer enough control and they mostly succeed or sometimes
don't ([https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/12/css-baseline-the-
go...](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/12/css-baseline-the-good-the-bad-
and-the-ugly/))

But you certainly cannot expect them to come up with optimal default working
for every single site out there.

So setting proper line-height has to remain the site's responsibility. And
something as simple as unitless 1.4-1.6 would improve readability with any
"regular" font.

Given that HN isn't exactly famous for using fancy fonts, which isn't a bad
thing at all. ;)

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
I agree, but if "line-height: 1.25" (my browser's interpretation of 'normal')
is 'wrong' more often than not, browser vendors should fix that.

~~~
dmitriz
In my browser it looks more like '1.25'. And the worst part -- I can't see it
in the dev tools! It shows me 'normal' as computed value and I still don't
know what it is!

Apparently HN is using table layout and `line-height: normal` is set by UA on
any table. This is the first time I can't overwrite it by setting it on
`body`.

This just breaks anything I know and only leads to frustration.

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

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
The author of the piece is clearly not a designer, and clearly doesn't have
much of a handle on web design. They refer to HN and Pinboard as 'eschewing
user-friendly interfaces' which is the complete opposite of what these clean,
fast, simple designs do; for the user in general, but especially for their
intended audience.

I fear this is simply evidence of how years of exposure to appalling design
has blinkered some people. I like your analogy, but I think a better one would
be taking a typical paperback novel from your shelf and claiming it were
'ugly' and 'difficult to read'.

------
golemotron
> But brutalism remains one of those things where you know it when you see it.
> And lately, you see it a lot.

Lately? Craigslist and Drudge are both about two decades old. HN, one decade.

~~~
kagamine
Ah, but brutalism is this week's buzzword so all you have to do is not check
the actual meaning of the word, make up your definition and start blogging.
Remember when skeuomorphism was the buzzword and everybody got that wrong too?

I've said this before, but IxD and UX are problem areas in IT when too many
people are self-taught. Reading a couple of blogs about the subject isn't
enough. Self-taught programmers will see when something works or fails because
their code will run or not. IxD and UX have often difficult to define specs
and hard to measure results. No formal education in the subject is really easy
to spot in people who blog and don't have it. Source: I have a degree in IxD.

Far too much of what pops up on the net on this subject is just wrong; but HN
users are right in this thread, HN is a good example of a clean and easy to
use GUI. Is there room for improvement? Probably. Are those improvements
critical to the site? Probably not.

------
im3w1l
I don't think simplistic design like HN's has much in common with those busy,
gimmicky pages.

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

------
LeoPanthera
Irony. [http://i.imgur.com/J8AJJBh.png](http://i.imgur.com/J8AJJBh.png)

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

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

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

Also Jaron Lanier's personal website would completely fit the description:
[http://www.jaronlanier.com/](http://www.jaronlanier.com/)

~~~
dmitriz
Impressive personality. But horrendous choice of colors for the web page. To
the point of pain for the eyes just to look at it. Not to mention reading.

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

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

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

------
state
You can thank Metahaven[0] for this.

0 - [http://mthvn.tumblr.com/](http://mthvn.tumblr.com/)

------
skittleson
Subjective. I actually like this design

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

~~~
smelendez
The cover of the print issue that week showed Yahoo's sale as if it were a
telephone pole yard sale sign. I think it's trying for a mix of that and the
90s aesthetic.

It looks like the confusing ui is only in the first paragraph, right?

~~~
dmitriz
The underlined non-links go throughout the article.

Mocking someone's bad design is hardly a valid reason for hindering own
readers, if the purpose of the article is actually being read. As opposed to
being visually admired without reading ;)

------
FussyZeus
_Looking at the brutalistwebsites sites_

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

