The hottest trend in web design is making intentionally ugly, difficult sites | Hacker News Reader

The hottest trend in web design is making intentionally ugly, difficult sites

washingtonpost.com

42 pointsdmitriz57 comments

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The article is just recapping the description of and linking to this site:

http://brutalistwebsites.com

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11517491

https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-report-is...

> 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/

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.

Not to mention their massive navbar obscuring the view, and the inability to put text into their images ;)

http://cl.ly/2x3m091s3U0D

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)

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

It's necessary for some things like games and certain web apps. I made a javascript game awhile ago, about guessing the next character in source code, which required disabling Tab.

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.

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.

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

It should be something you have to opt into, with one cancellation button not overridable, similar to fullscreen mode.

It also prompted me to install the app, which is always nice.

Didn't Google work out that 'get the app' modals result 70%of the time in immediate tab closure, in the general population, not just among us angry HN nerds?

It doesn't do any of those things to me (using Chrome). Has the submission been changed to point to a different site?

(Currently linking to [1])

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/05...

People complain that the Firefox NoScript extension is hard to use and breaks sites, and I see threads like this and think 'time to re-evaluate'.

The site with FF + NoScript loads perfectly. Everything I need to read the article and use my keyboard shortcuts works fine, no tampering with my preferences. 20 requests, about 1.5kB and loads in just a hair over one second for me - perfect.

It really is an improvement over the defaults that most websites deliver. It's true that some sites completely break without JavaScript but these are not the norm, and if they are worthy you can always choose to whitelist them temporarily or permanently. I've used the extension for about ten years and have only needed to whitelist a few dozen sites total.

Do yourselves a favor and give it a try if you haven't already. I can't guarantee you will love it immediately but as your 'cut through all the bullshit' option it truly excels.

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

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.

Thanks!

I hate the modern design where there is one large picture at the top, and you scroll down to read the article. At some point, when scrolling down while reading, the article will randomly jump down a page or two, and I have to scroll back and find the place I was at.

I presume there is a purpose to this random jump, as I see it on site after site, but I cannot divine what it might be.

One of the reasons I like hackernews is its complete lack of artifice and trendy design.

My presentation slides also tend to be simple black on white text, using the default font, with zero decoration, borders, or any sort of design. The upside is even the back row has no trouble reading them :-)

I feel the same way. It seems to be compulsory to make you scroll through a huge image for no reason these days, and when you do get to some text you have about one paragraph before you have to scroll to the next huge block, usually with some coloured background.

I don't know what they are thinking...

Maybe it's supposed to be "cool" like buying new jeans that are already ripped. My JCPenney jeans look like Abercrombie&Fitch jeans after a few months all by themselves.

They are thinking "most people are too lazy to read, so we need to hold their attention with more images". Unfortunately, they are not thinking to have a button "I want to read, make your images get lost", which would cater for smaller but still considerable part of population.

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

I read they were written in D too, is that true. Makes me want to give D another look. I used it a bit but various issues made me drift away from it.

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...

This site does loads fast but it does not have much content either. Plus, the list of articles in the side bar seems to be exactly the same as in the content right next to it, so the useful content is even less ;)

Plus the fact that it only seems exactly the same is wasting reader's time to check it.

On the positive side, the site authors did actually make the most important design decision -- to increase space between lines. On the less positive side, they did not do it for the title, which might be due to only checking how it look on the main page but not here: http://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b92.html

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?

"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.

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

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.

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.

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

Perhaps one or two small changes like changing the line height and a comment de-scope button would be nice for usability.

It's important not to go down the slippery slope of adding too much functionality, in my opinion - look at Reddit, for instance. Structurally, very similar to HN, but I'd say it adds a little too much control and detail to the end user. Do I need to know a comment's exact karma rating, the ammount of users online in a subreddit? Does there need to be two different submit buttons? It goes on and on...

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.

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...)

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. ;)

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.

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.

People don't read the interface. You sometimes see people complaining about a paywall, and being grateful when they're told about the "web" link.

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.

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'.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

Irony. http://i.imgur.com/J8AJJBh.png

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

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.

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/

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.

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.

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

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).

You can thank Metahaven[0] for this.

0 - http://mthvn.tumblr.com/

Subjective. I actually like this design

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

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?

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 ;)

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.

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