
Brutalist Websites - ot
http://brutalistwebsites.com/
======
gradstudent
IMO, the cited examples are minimalist but not brutalist. When I think of a
brutalist website I think of the design elements being exposed as part of the
presentation. Frames and tables with exposed borders and ugly html buttons --
not, as suggested by the OP, clean layouts driven by an invisible style sheet.

A typical JavaDoc page for example, rather than Hacker News.

~~~
jrochkind1
I don't know that it has to be ugly. I think the good brutalist architecture
is quite beautiful, as well as very pleasant to use (it's a misconception that
brutalist design is meant to be _brutal_ towards it's users, although the bad
stuff is -- and I think, maybe heretically, much of Le Corbusier is pretty
bad).

When I think of brutalist, I think no frills, and putting the infrastructural
elements forward, not covering them up with any surface-level aesthetics.
Exposing the infrastructural bones, hiding nothing.

I don't think it's at all obvious what this means for a website. The very very
abstract nature of all software makes it perhaps impossible to put the
'concrete' forward (double meaning intended, but primarily here as the
opposite of 'abstract'), there's no there there. But I think it's interesting
to think about, and the candidates listed there are contenders worth
considering.

But there's a link to submit more, you should submit a JavaDoc page, I'm sure
they'll list it too.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Brutalism is monolithic concrete forms like UK 70s tower blocks.

You appear to be thinking of exposed services of structural expressionism or
Bowellism; like the Pompidou in Paris or Lloyd's building in London - they're
not brutalism to my mind, far from it.

I'd associate it with exposed structural materials (no veneers out paneling)
and a utilitarian aesthetic.

~~~
jrochkind1
I'm familiar with brutalism. I think the ideology of the exposed structural
materials is to show infrastructure without artifice. By "infrastructure" I
don't just mean the electrical/plumbing or whatever as maybe hilighted in
bowelism. The first definition of infrastructure in the random dictionary I
looked up online is "the underlying foundation or basic framework."

As wikipedia says of brutalism, "There is often an emphasis on graphically
expressing in the external elevations and in the whole-site architectural plan
the main functions and people-flows of the buildings." Some have called
brutalism the "truthful expression" of materials, structure, function.

I think it is interesting to think about how that might apply to web sites,
it's not entirely clear to me.

Brutalist buildings don't need to be brutal, here's one of my favorites:
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Geisel-L...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Geisel-
Library.jpg)

Many of the brutalist 70s tower blocks are wretched, but here's one I always
liked:
[http://wibiti.com/images/hpmain/029/273029.jpg](http://wibiti.com/images/hpmain/029/273029.jpg)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I'm probably off the mark but a mirrored facade is a long way from brutalism
to my view; the structure is certainly modernist but status too far from
utilitarianism for me to call it brutalist.

Also, I like some of the brutalist 70s tower blocks too, in the right context
(I'm quite fond of Goldfinger's Trellick), but your example seems to have too
many ornamental curves to be brutalism (at least as far as that classification
is used in the UK).

~~~
jrochkind1
Which example? They're both widely known as brutalist examples here in the US.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geisel_Library](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geisel_Library)

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

I dunno, I guess it's "I know it when I see it", and we each know different
things when we see them, heh.

------
bikamonki
If borrowing the term from Architecture, then a brutalist website should be
one that (only) uses the 'raw' (original) elements of design and functionality
(cannot separate both in web design), namely: page layout + font face + color
palette for the graphic design component, and links + media for the functional
(hypermedia) component. As such, I do not see how modernizing the style
through functional paradigms, like a flat design UI, breaks the original
canon. However, we could argue that anything else, like flashy add-ons such as
element transitions, drop-downs, fades, etc, do break the canon and are just a
response to trends, just like a bunch of useless zippers and pockets do not
add functional value to a trendy jacket but definitely help sell it.

Efficient use of resources and fast loading is a entire different subject.
Enter the engineer, leave the architect. It is absolutely possible to program
any design paradigm to perform fast and efficiently.

~~~
platz
I wonder what the website equivalent of concrete is.

"There is often an emphasis on graphically expressing in the external
elevations and in the whole-site architectural plan the main functions and
people-flows of the buildings."

This might suggest ways to express navigation that are explicit and not hidden

~~~
USAnum1
Another thing I thought of was using the <table> tag for layout.

It's austere, as well as an anti-pattern when used exclusively. Despite this,
it just plain gets the job done. It has also proven quite sturdy/reliable,
even on popular sites like this one.

~~~
cmiller1
One of the things I kind of miss about the table based layouts of yesteryear
was it seemed to be a lot easier to make sites that looked good in
terminal/text based web browsers. The modern idea of doing all of your actual
layout in CSS doesn't degrade as well for text based browsers.

Here's a challenge for you frontend hackers out there: show me a now standard
<ul> based horizontal nav-bar... that also renders horizontally in w3m and
lynx.

~~~
duderific
I've always felt a little uncomfortable using <ul> for a horizontal nav bar
(although I'm aware that is a common usage). <ul> is a block level element and
so is not semantically correct for a horizontal set of elements.

~~~
majewsky
> <ul> is a block level element

This just happens to be the default style. At its core, <ul> is an unordered
list. Whether you happen to arrange the items horizontally, vertically, or any
other way, is just presentation. Which is precisely why CSS is separate from
HTML.

------
Trufa
I'm not sure if I understand the categorization of it all, is it non modern
web design, or no fluff?

Because you can't compare some to others:

[https://context.co.de/](https://context.co.de/) pretty nice, reminds you of
man, nice and simple, one could even call it minimalist or whatever...

[http://ethanbond.com/](http://ethanbond.com/) not a bad idea for a simple
resume page. it's clean cut.

[http://drudgereport.com/](http://drudgereport.com/) I will never go through
that.

[http://trendlist.org/](http://trendlist.org/) just looks like css is not
loading.

[http://laurelschwulst.com/](http://laurelschwulst.com/) I want to tear my
eyes out.

~~~
userbinator
[http://drudgereport.com/](http://drudgereport.com/) reminds me of
[http://stallman.org/](http://stallman.org/)

~~~
ams6110
Its interesting to me that many of the people who are in the "who's who" of
our space have a very bare-bones web presence.

[http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dfried/](http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dfried/)

[http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/](http://www-cs-
faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/)

[http://javascript.crockford.com/](http://javascript.crockford.com/)

~~~
efnx
It seems to me that web design trends tend to change faster than most people's
patience for maintaining their personal site, so it makes sense that anyone
with a sufficient amount of work to do who is not a web designer would choose
a very simple "just get the info out there" design. Specifically these guys
you posted have been in computing forever and are very, very busy.

Personally I can't justify more than updating bootstrap every six months or
so. I'd rather spend that time on open source or with my family.

------
chezhead
Just showed some of these to a generally non-tech-savy friend who said he
didn't like them because they looked "too 90s." Personally I love them because
they load fast, are easy to read, and don't require a knowledge of a bunch of
different frameworks to write.

~~~
ben_jones
Yeah but what design principles make the most money?

~~~
Retra
That depends on what year it is.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Amazon isn't going to win any design awards. Neither is ebay. Then there's the
Google home page, which while not quite as free of "design" cruft as it once
was, is still pretty minimalist.

All of those sites have been around forever (in Internet time), and they all
rake in tons of money, despite their lack of (indeed, willful indifference to)
trendy design esthetics.

Someone mentioned drudgereport.com above. That's just plain black text on a
white background. It has an Alexa rank of 130.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
They rake in tons of money because many users care a lot less about the look
and feel than they do about the service/content they provide.

But many is not all. If they were designed to be beautiful as well as
functional, they might well see a bump in transactions.

The reason they don't is either deliberate branding (Drudge, I'd guess) or
incompetence (eBay), or because it's not obvious the bump in traffic would be
worth the expense and time (Amazon.)

And also history. When you've been around as a brand for a decade or more, you
don't need shiny.

But it's really not a good plan for a startup to have an ugly site now unless
it's making some kind of ironic retro point about itself.

~~~
dave2000
> If they were designed to be beautiful as well as > functional, they might
> well see a bump in transactions.

More people would visit, or people would just buy more when they were already
visiting?

I find it amusing that some of the most popular sites are considered bad
designs by people who think they have all the answers to web site design (at
least, they're getting involved in this season's look), whereas the sites
which apparently demonstrate good design are ugly, less pleasant to navigate,
and harder to extract information from.

------
leviathant
"Brutalism can be seen as a reaction by a younger generation to the lightness,
optimism, and frivolity of todays webdesign"

...except the links include FFFFOUND, Pokey the Penguin, Craigslist, and The
Drudge Report - a website almost old enough that it could vote in an American
election.

~~~
azazqadir
Exactly. Most of the websites look like they were designed in 90s, which would
made them good for their time.

------
sawyerjhood
Some of these sites are so refreshing. I'm starting to get tired of seeing the
same "minimalistic" landing pages for every website I go to. This reminds me
of a time when the web was younger.

~~~
mchahn
> I'm starting to get tired of seeing the same "minimalistic" landing pages

I can't take enough minimalism. I hate complex websites from 10 years ago. I
do have a little problem with all the new sites that make you scroll down
forever but I'll take that over a site with a hundred graphics on the front
page.

~~~
anexprogrammer
I despise the trend for _content_ minimalism. Where once there was a headline
and sub, there's often now a cute little tile with picture and trimmed
headline needing 20x the space to show the same number of stories. bbc.co.uk

Or homepages that tell you nothing at all
[https://www.optimizely.com](https://www.optimizely.com)

I don't want a wall of text, or the complex design and navigation of 10 years
back, but I abhor the tendency to tell you next to nothing, but with
bootstrap.

------
rtpg
What's the pitch for brutalism? At least for buildings I've seen, they have
all seemed to fail on a usability and aesthetic side.

Is there something appealing to building a dystopian building?

~~~
smitherfield
I'm in Boston, pretty much the epicenter. I can't think of many redeeming
qualities.

My sense of the genre is that it was an attempt to copy Eastern Bloc
architecture by architects who were warmly disposed to the Eastern Bloc, and
had either disabused themselves or wanted to disabuse us of bourgeois notions
of aesthetics and good taste.

IMO, although it has definitely improved over the last 40-50 years,
architecture peaked aesthetically circa the turn of the 20th century ( _Art
Nouveau_ [0], Gaudí).

[0]
[https://www.google.com/search?q=art+nouveau+architecture&tbm...](https://www.google.com/search?q=art+nouveau+architecture&tbm=isch)

~~~
trentmb
> I can't think of many redeeming qualities.

I find it clean, non-distracting, 'sterile'\- I end up focusing more on the
people around me than the buildings towering over me.

~~~
rspeer
Our upside-down city hall and the plaza wasteland around it are described as
brutalist, and yet I would not call City Hall "non-distracting" or the plaza
"clean".

~~~
smitherfield
I think a lot of people ITT may be confusing Brutalism and modernist
architecture in general. "Clean," "unobtrusive" and so on are not adjectives
I'd use to describe it (Brutalist architecture).

------
praptak
Wanna analogy between brick & mortar and webdesign? Here's one:

In both there are ego-driven movements that result in useless, showoff
designs. Wanna send a message, make a statement or make a mark? Go paint a
picture and hang it in an art gallery.

But websites and buildings are something that real people actually use, so
fuck off with your -isms. Make websites where content is readable and easy to
navigate. Make buildings that are great to live and work in as opposed to
those whose mockups look unique and stunning in "Architectural wankery
monthly".

------
wwweston
A couple of comments in response to other comments:

> I can't see a consistent trend here

My guess is that's because we're talking about a meta-aesthetic that borders
on anti-aesthetic.

Particularly for the last 10 years, design on the web and in software in
general has been especially trend driven and strongly aestheticized. And
arguably in a way that moved outside of consciously or conscientiously chosen
and well into either ostentatiousness or default.

When people become aware of a trend, they also become aware there's an area of
creative opportunity that a lot of people aren't working in. The move from
high-relief/"lickable"/skeuomorphic design to flat design is an example
everyone here knows.

This might be a meta-trend away from strongly aestheticized. Whether or not
you can actually have an anti-aesthetic is probably a good philosophical
question, but I think as a practical concept.

> Just showed some of these to a generally non-tech-savy friend who said he
> didn't like them because they looked "too 90s." Personally I love them
> because they load fast, are easy to read, and don't require a knowledge of a
> bunch of different frameworks to write.

Like you, I like a lot of simple pages (sometimes I use Lynx for simplicity!).

But as you observed for in your friend, for a general audience, I do think an
anti-aesthetic is likely to have an uphill battle; visual communications isn't
a science but it's real, and some people make judgments on visuals (and almost
everyone is influenced by them).

------
vog
There's a somewhat-famous blog which fits quite well into this scheme (sorry,
German language, but you won't miss out much, anyway ;-)):

[https://blog.fefe.de/](https://blog.fefe.de/)

Also, the HTML versions of RFCs seem to qualify, such as:

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1855](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1855)

And of course the HTML versions of manpages are usually renedered in a
minimalist style, too:

[https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=du](https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=du)

------
mirimir
[https://hastebin.com/](https://hastebin.com/) vs
[http://pastebin.com/](http://pastebin.com/) ;)

~~~
quotemstr
[https://hastebin.com/](https://hastebin.com/) is serving the wrong
certificate.

~~~
mirimir
It's self-signed, as I recall.

~~~
quotemstr
The certificate is for heroku, IIRC. Even if were for the right CN and just
self-signed, that'd still make it the wrong certificate.

~~~
mirimir
Thanks. Careless of them :(

But still, it's easy to use. No cruft. No annoying CAPTCHAs and other BS when
using via Tor. And I only share ASCII-armored encrypted/signed stuff, anyway.
So HTTPS doesn't matter much for me.

Is there a better pastebin that you'd recommend?

------
fludlight
Warren Buffett's holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, could go on this list.
Berkshire's operating subsidiaries (Geico, Duracell, Heinz, etc) have fancy
modern websites but the investment company's looks like it predates Geocities.
IIRC this is because they don't want to spend money on an already functional
website that isn't really selling anything.

------
jiiam
Most of these websites have zero load time, compared to their fancy non-
brutalist counterparts. I's say, let's have more brutalist websites.

I know it's because the fancier counterparts are JS-intensive, but it's still
a question worth asking: "Why are we in the time where a nice website should
take seconds to load?"

------
tragomaskhalos
As an overt visual design paradigm, meh. But hallelujah to the idea of a page
that just has content, without the trendily de rigeur fucktons of overblown
css and pointless javascript that adds 0 and only serves to crash my crappy
mobile browser.

------
V-2
Of course you can have rich and highly functional design, as well as very
functional, minimalist barebone design.

It's always harder to come up with a design that's simultaneously pleasing and
feels easy to use, but throwing design out of the window altogether is nothing
but a copout. It's the easiest thing to do, but is it a solution, or just an
attempt to make some sort of a point?

To me it's the equivalent of shaky camera and black-and-white filming: every
film student's act of rebellion against James Cameron and the like ; )

------
Morantron
[http://vimbarcelona.org/](http://vimbarcelona.org/) user group website, is so
brutalist that it even uses a <blink> tag

 _shameless plug_

------
ekianjo
Hacker news part of that list, really?

~~~
kennywinker
HN and reddit are two of the first things I thought of after I saw the first
few examples.

If brutalism is favouring functionality over "design", then they are some of
the most popular examples I know of.

~~~
userbinator
I don't browse Reddit unless I was linked there, so I might not have seen all
it has to offer, but my impression is that it's far more "fluffy" than HN.

~~~
creshal
Reddit's default theme is more or less as spartan as HN, it just uses more JS
for interactivity. However, each sub can configure their own theme, which
tends to lead to geocities syndrome.

(If you're registered, you can disable themes, presumably for that reason.)

------
undoware
'Younger generation'. Kids, I wish I could give you my backcopies of NTK.
Brutalism is a fine, ancient tradition of web design. Welcome. :)

------
nickpsecurity
I can't see a consistent trend here. Whereas, I'm reminded of something else
that seems similar but makes more sense. Here's a web and software example of
that other philosophy.

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

[http://suckless.org/philosophy](http://suckless.org/philosophy)

------
smegel
I think I prefer brutalist architecture a lot more.

I am quite fond on this one in Sydney that was in the news recently:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirius_building](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirius_building)

------
kennell
Relevant: [http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/)
and
[http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com)

------
vortico
If you don't give a shit about web design but want to portray information
effectively, you can use `markdown index.md > index.html` to generate web
pages like my personal website. It's not "brutalist" design but just neural in
my opinion.

------
agumonkey
I tend to call this vanillahtml. I gathered a few on
[http://reddit.com/r/vanillahtml](http://reddit.com/r/vanillahtml) for the
curious

------
jokoon
I submitted mine

[http://imgur.com/PueJCdO](http://imgur.com/PueJCdO)

Somebody chuckled at me at a job interview when I showed this website :(

------
code_research
Please post more examples of oldschool, web 0.1 and other ugly websites, thank
you!

Are there any (curated) online collections ( besides random searching on
archive.org)?

------
jperras
Our site (fictivekin.com) made that list.

I think we'd describe it more as intentinonal retro-minimalism instead of
brutalist, but that's just me.

------
tommynicholas
Could I get [https://blankslate.io](https://blankslate.io) on here? Is it
brutalist enough?

~~~
madeofpalk
It appears you need to switch the font to either Courier or Times New Roman
before you could get on the list.

~~~
tommynicholas
Hmmm... Not sure it's worth it

------
nxzero
Always called sites like these "utralight" though no idea if that's a standard
term.

------
stevebmark
I see that for web, as with architecture, "brutalist" is shorthand for "bad"

~~~
spriggan3
Saying "brutalism" is bad is being totally ignorant of the work of architects
like Le Corbusier.

[https://goo.gl/T5o4Gk](https://goo.gl/T5o4Gk)

On the other hand, half of the links on that website are just bad design and
have nothing to do with brutalism.

~~~
enjo
I mean, I think Le Corbusier's work is sort of awful :) I'm not an architect,
just a casual fan of architecture. For my personal taste the whole brutalist
movement was a long series of boring, intimidating, and repressive buildings
that scar the primarily urban environments they were built in even to this
day. Especially University Campuses where the style was so popular for so long
(Christopher Alexander is a hero of mine).

Interestingly, OP's list of sites are largely ones I dislike as well.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
The "interview" for the Drudge Report is hilarious.

------
soufron
Genius! They should add the RMS website.

------
rawTruthHurts
As opposed to neo-classical websites?

------
anthk
Satan is my Lord!!!

------
thought_alarm

        F  U  N

------
cookiemonsta
tired.com is my favourite of this kind

~~~
plaguuuuuu
wat

------
mmaunder
Oh.ASCII.

------
spriggan3
That's not "brutalism" as defined by industrial designers and architects ...
yet another idiotic buzzword since "flat design" or "zero ui" don't sell
anymore, yet another misused expression by web designers .... Seriously, who
is making up that crap ?

~~~
drb311
Here I am in Birmingham, England. A city determined to blow up our wonderful
brutalist buildings and replace it with ornamented crap.

Brutalism means letting a functional concrete building look concrete and
functional -- revealing its function and materials in the design.

A brutalist web site should LOOK like a web site, and build its appearance
around its function, not some fancy science-fi fantasy.

Here's some text. Here's an image. Here's a heading. Here's a link. They all
do different things, they are all in different places.

By that reckoning a few of the examples are brutalist. Hacker News,
craigslist, Daniel Eatock. They are not minimalist, because they do not hide
their functional complexity. They reveal the functional complexity in their
design.

These are popular, powerful, ugly sites and I'd love to see more of them.

~~~
anthk
Brutalist 'hood = junkie area.

------
Kinnard
[http://brutalistwebsites.com/news.ycombinator.com/](http://brutalistwebsites.com/news.ycombinator.com/)
. . . not to mention in his own dialect of lisp — arc:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html)

