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Arguably, a major point of Brutalism is letting the essence of the materials come through rather than covering them up. In that sense, I think "Brutalist" web design would connote embracing things like hypertext, links, and hierarchical structure rather than building up the illusion that your website is some ethereal dance of pure unsullied UX. The infamous "Motherfucking Website" [1] might be the best-known example of deliberately showcasing this approach.

[1] http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

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I think that early web (say, pre-Web 2.0) was the epitome of Brutalist design. Because resources were limited, you had to make the most of what you had, leading to that no-nonsense, sparse style. I think it's beautiful, in its own way.

That's an interesting idea. There's something very raw about those university.edu/department/~username pages that existed with the most basic of HTML--unstyled tables, blue anchor links, images only when you needed them, and almost no Yavascript.

That rawness, without too many attribute tags let alone CSS, is brutalist.

Olia Lialina has a great piece about the aesthetics of "Prof. Dr. Style": http://contemporary-home-computing.org/prof-dr-style/

Thanks for this link! Never knew someone gave this "style" a name. (And an apt one to boot)

Btw, the university pages you mention are still extremely common, at least in mathematics-related fields

When I'm searching for info on something, if I land on a page with no styling and no multimedia beyond hypertext and images, I know I've hit something good because it's almost certainly an academic's personal page!

Yep, "existed" is the wrong tense. My university's entire CS and Engineering schools run on those style of pages.

I think you're giving early web "design" far too much credit. To say something is "brutalist" describes an intentional aesthetic - early pages really where purely functional, and any aesthetic flourishes really were limited by the technology despite aspirations to design something beautiful (whatever that means).

Fair point. I didn't mean to imply it was an intentional design choice, just that it was "selected for" by the "nature" of the platform (ha!). And with regard to "beauty", I just meant that it was almost elegant in a way that modern design tries to do away with.

For instance, if a site didn't have a proper search function, but had a pretty logical URL scheme, you could often find what you need by trying a few permutations in the address bar. The limitations of the system meant web "designers" (I'm using that term loosely) had to build fairly organized and unintentionally "Brutalist" sites if they wanted to be used by any large number of people.

Hope that made sense, I'm still waiting for my coffee to kick in.

In other words, a "Brutalist" website would look like a website from 1996. Which I dig, because I dislike the fancy stuff.

Photo.net until recently. Built on tcl.

I've never looked at photo.net, now I wish I could see it before it changed.

edit: I just checked it out on the wayback machine, I definitely like the old site better. Not as "pretty", but easier to navigate.

Motherfucking Website is too wide in my browser window. It would be a lot easier to read on desktop with even just one line of CSS:

    body { max-width: 60ch; }

You may enjoy http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com

https://bestmotherfucking.website is where it's at.

Yes! The "better" site had crappy contrast.

This can be achieved by adjusting the size of the browser window. Not only does this give fine-grained control to all users, but as a bonus it frees up the horizontal space to be used to display other things alongside.

So maybe... Craigslist?

e.g. http://radio.spodeli.org/kanal103/chetvrtok/2000-2200.html

Brutalist on-demand radio streaming platform that I've build.

That's a pretty good selection of tracks.

"Kanal 103" is a cult indie FM station from Skopje.

Recordings expire (overwritten) after one week.

Let's resurrect WAP

Maybe this is my own horrible opinion, but that site would feel less pretentious in monospaced courier.

How so? Times is browser default and was easier to read than a monospaced font.

It's easier for me to read, as far as I can tell. http://russrizzo.net/ is an example, but maybe it's just size.

What does the site you linked look like in IE6? Is there an Easter egg?

The Easter egg is that it works perfectly, and it has the same exact aspect as in any other modern browser.

a major point of Brutalism is letting the essence of the materials come through rather than covering them up

So......something like this? http://www.zerobugsandprogramfaster.net/brutalist.html That can get recursive real fast.

Or theoretically this: https://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/matrix/images/8/84/Matr... Harder to read, though, at least for people like me who don't have much experience.

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