
Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need - vanni
https://www.imaginarycloud.com/blog/why-we-need-web-brutalism/
======
smacktoward
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.

~~~
ianbicking
The ZK/U site (in one of the thumbnails) is one of the better examples, I
thought: [http://www.zku-berlin.org/](http://www.zku-berlin.org/)

~~~
smacktoward
Yes, that one jumped out at me as an actually good example too!

------
tomc1985
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
Beaucorp! What a great new word. One of the world-spanning megacorporations
from William Gibson _but_ decorated in a Beaux-Arts style.

~~~
tomc1985
It's an old word, afaik. Means 'mega' in this context. Also I mispelled it :D

~~~
khedoros1
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
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
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).

------
kaiby
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/)

~~~
krrrh
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.mozill...](https://web.archive.org/web/20000229231038/http://www.mozilla.org:80/)

------
SlapHappy
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).

~~~
eeZah7Ux
Describing a startup-happy billionaire-loving site like HN as "anti-bourgeois"
is comical.

~~~
cwkoss
Describing any CSS style or design pattern as "anti-bourgeois" is comical.

~~~
DonHopkins
Sounds like a job for Comic Sans!

------
_bxg1
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
I think there is a difference between design that is deliberately raw, and
something that hasn’t been designed at all.

~~~
TeMPOraL
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.

------
bobsondugnutt
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
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.

------
Rotdhizon
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.

~~~
mhink
> 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.

------
wffurr
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
> 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
> _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.

------
tzahola
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.

------
cschmidt
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/

------
digi_owl
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.

~~~
tzahola
This.

Brutalism is inherently utilitarian. Content over presentation.

IETF RFCs _are_ brutalist.

~~~
tfranco
Won the internet

------
daleco
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.

------
pnathan
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.

------
spyckie2
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
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.

------
master_ant
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
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
Correct. Bootstrap is the IKEA of frontend frameworks. Simple, predictable,
cheap/free, and easy enough for almost anyone to pick up and build with.

------
rayiner
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.)

~~~
erikpukinskis
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
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
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)

~~~
rayiner
You’re conflating minimalism with Brutalism. Brutalism is about design
exposing functionality. Lots of layers in the stack expose functionality
(hardware, the OS, the DOM), but presentation is design, not functional. You
could switch the default font from one thing to another with zero functional
effect.

~~~
erikpukinskis
I admitted as much in the comment. :) I felt that your comment applied equally
to brutalist, modernism, and minimalism. Your assertion that there is no
underlying material to expose. All three ideas are ways of grounding the
design in material.

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

------
pkamb
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)

~~~
nugi
1st link, 'javascript is required'. Brutal indeed.

------
EGreg
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.

------
thedirt0115
Larry Wall (creator of Perl) was ahead of the curve on brutalist design :)
[http://www.wall.org/~larry/](http://www.wall.org/~larry/)

------
HelloNurse
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.

------
deepakkarki
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.

------
jopuwep12489
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.

------
cwkoss
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.

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

------
Phait
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
>
> [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??

------
toddmorey
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....](http://osscreenshots.s3-us-
west-2.amazonaws.com/bruatalist1.png) [2] [http://osscreenshots.s3-us-
west-2.amazonaws.com/brutalist2.p...](http://osscreenshots.s3-us-
west-2.amazonaws.com/brutalist2.png)

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

~~~
tfranco
Like an RFC?

------
kroltan
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
Nice work. I see you used your CSS sparingly.

------
tree_of_item
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
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)

------
eecc
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

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

------
scott113341
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
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)

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

~~~
kolpa
What does "Philosophically and aesthetically brutalist and uncomfortable."
mean?

~~~
forkLding
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/)

------
saagarjha
> 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.

------
hypertexthero
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-
be...](https://www.simongriffee.com/notebook/web-design-where-to-begin/)

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quantumofmalice
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
Whas the site down?

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thomastodon
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.

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

------
lwansbrough
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.

------
iambateman
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?

------
robeastham
Original article currently offline for me and so I found it here:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20180413180014/https://www.imagi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180413180014/https://www.imaginarycloud.com/blog/why-
we-need-web-brutalism/)

------
sergiotapia
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?

------
blhack
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.

------
purplezooey
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.

------
tw1010
Convince me this isn't just a ploy by designers to justify their existence
over templates.

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

------
syndacks
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.

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simplify
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.

------
avinium
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.

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

~~~
code_duck
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.

------
crb002
Homogenized is OK. Better UX that is evidence based than betting the farm on
an art project.

