Tagged: brutalism

Examining the characteristics of Web Brutalism, why it can be effective, and what it takes to design a Brutalist website.

Probably the best description of Web Brutalism I’ve read.

Look at Hacker News. Pinboard. The Drudge Report. Adult Swim. Bloomberg Businessweek features. All of these sites — some years old, some built recently — and hundreds more like them, eschew the templated, user-friendly interfaces that have long been the industry’s best practice. Instead they’re built on imperfect, hand-coded HTML and take their design cues from ’90s graphics.

I’m not sure if I should take umbrage at the “imperfect, hand-coded HTML” comment. I’m sure the author didn’t mean to imply that all hand-coded HTML is imperfect, I mean there is a strategically placed comma in there, but I would imagine it would be easy to read it as that.

Anyhow, I love the brutalist movement/trend and I’d love to see more of it. In many ways, the web has become far too boring, with frameworks like Bootstrap contributing to what feels like a homogenised web. Brutalist websites offer a welcome break from that.