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> I'm confused. I don't see what makes most of the examples cited here "Brutalist" in any meaningful fashion.

Because these examples have nothing to do with "brutalism" in architecture. It's just another buzzword misappropriated by (web) designers. 5 years ago everything was "flat" now everything is "brutalist" including what was "flat".

Designers shouldn't pick a style because it's trendy, they should do their job as designers and actually design for their intended audience and medium.

HN is no more "brutalist" than Craiglist. Effective web design should be optimized for fast loading times, readability, easy information retrieval and responsiveness. These issues are far more challenging than trying to fit a style du jour.

It also used to be called "anti-design". The concept has been around for a while. I really get annoyed when terms like "brutalism" are co-opted as yet another buzzword/trend/fad.

>I really get annoyed when terms like "brutalism" are co-opted as yet another buzzword/trend/fad.

Along with native and real time.

Realtime native quantum ai makes your payments with blockchain to change industry!

change -> disrupt

Now that’s how you get investors

As for "exposed structures", I'd include the prominence of the box model underlying the rendered HTML, emphasized by visible borders and/or distinct backgrounds.

As others are mentioning, the border-heavy http://www.zku-berlin.org (included in the article's examples) qualifies, and so do 1990s-style websites that appear to be authored with tables and don't try to cloak the inner workings of the layout.

Ooh, I like that. That's a very useful interpretation! Thanks!

Then again, the label 'brutalist' is fraught with conflated interpretations that to some followed logically, yet in other contexts they appear to be in conflict. From the very beginning, the term sprung out of linguistic confusion between French and English [1], where Le Corbusier's French descriptor for 'raw concrete' was lost in translation and reinterpreted by English commentators as brutal, then art imitated life as later works seized on this attitude and were intentionally designed to be provocative [2].

So no one knows whether brutalism is concrete-heavy minimalism, or concrete-heavy bizarro-showoffism, but the core of it is the use of a drab but versatile, non-organic material, so one could venture to guess that any website that features excessive use of color and vibrancy, and cloaking the existence of edges between disparate functional blocks would automatically be disqualified on aesthetics alone.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12685595#12689331 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12685595#12688364

Brutalist architecture was a disaster, especially in countries like the UK where poor light and regular rain make grey concrete one of the most depressing and least durable of all possible building materials.

The UK was littered with Brutalist "statement" buildings. Most have been pulled down now, and - with a few high profile exceptions, which have escaped the low-budget ghetto most of the movement settled in - the style is generally considered a mistake.

I have no idea why anyone would want to copy the aesthetic in web design. But then the designs on show don't look Brutalist so much as "edgy" 80s magazine kitsch, which in turn influenced a certain kind of minimal web style which has actually been around since the 90s.

It's true that web design lacks real creativity and diversity, but that's partly because web pages that are trying to sell you something - as opposed to making an artistic statement - are optimised to balance content delivery with behaviour modification with cognitive load. There are only so many ways to do that, and the affordable ones are already in use.

On the other hand I really enjoyed all the Brutalist architecture on the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus. The imposing concrete buildings made a great contrast to the otherwise entirely natural beauty of the Pioneer Valley.

That's why brutalist architecture works best when it includes large windows and sky lights.

What makes the brutalist buildings in the Pacific Northwest beautiful is that many of them are now covered in vegetation, with mosses or vines muting their harshness.

That said, this so-called "brutalist web design" is bullshit. It's just avant-garde design of the 80s applied to web pages.

There were a whole bunch of such buildings on the UC Berkeley campus, and one was allowed to be covered with vines like that - absolutely gorgeous.

I think there is something aesthetically pure about those big concrete monoliths in a setting like Berkeley, or further north, where you can seem them in dense fog and smell fir trees at the same time. They start to remind you of tall cliffs and cave dwellings, rather than childrens' toys strewn on carpet.

Or another way of putting it - it gets you an aesethetic balance between nature and this austere artificiality.

What are some building I can visit around Portland?

https://twitter.com/KevinBuist/status/980947107489165314

We've all see this meme, it just perpetuates falsehoods about brutalism. However, it pretty much nails (maybe not intentionally) the increasingly common misguided discussion of it.

Very much this - as a Brit, Brutalism means to me all the eyesore buildings in faded concrete, grey against a grey sky, depressing buildings.

Buildings that dominate areas, make them feel unsafe and unfriendly. Buildings that create dark spaces for petty crime, spaces that smell of urine.

Buildings with no human warmth at all.

>Le Corbusier's French descriptor for 'raw concrete' was lost in translation and reinterpreted by English commentators as brutal,

I always thought that argument as flimsy, since the word brute exists in French and has exactly the same meaning as in English.

FWIW I'm recounting his own perspective [1], sourced [2][3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12685595#12689331 [2] https://f50collective.com/2016/09/19/brutalist-architecture/ [3] https://books.google.com/books?id=b-OUxSelykIC&lpg=PA18&ots=...

Francophone here.

There is a difference between "Une brute" (a brute) and, as mentioned, "béton brut" (raw/rough concrete).

In English there's a difference between a raw, rough person and raw, rough concrete, but there's a clear etymological link in using brute/brutal to describe them both.

It's similar to the way 'crude' can be used to refer to a person or oil that hasn't been through a refining process.

Regardless, it's a postrationalisation (or retranslation, perhaps?) by British architects to force some sort of etymological ancestry into the name of the 'movement' they decided to champion.

The only thing I can think of as web-brutalist is table-based layouts with the cell borders exposed.

Here is an "exposed structures and visible thought processes," website: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com

Came here for this and to also link http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com

Off topic, but I don’t like the “improved” text color. Subjectively, viewing on an iPhone X, it just seems to make the text ever so slightly indistinct, harder to read.

I suspect this is partly due to the “True Tone” feature, where the OS automatically adjusts the display’s color temperature to match ambient light. This makes the “white” background color appear less harsh (less blue) than in most displays, lessening the need for a lighter foreground color to soften the appearance.

Or maybe you could just say that it reduces the perceived contrast, lessening the need for further contrast reduction. I’m not sure if that’s actually true, though. The actual contrast ratio between anything other than black and black should be infinity on an OLED display, or even if you account for a tiny amount of diffuse reflection of incoming light, it would just be a (large) value dependent on the brightness setting.

Putting all the content in the middle third of my browser and wasting the rest with enormous empty white margins is not an improvement.

I much prefer the original black on white, personally.

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

i dont get brutalist vibe

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

This site is better viewed zoomed out to 60%

windows 2 is about to sue

> I'm not sure there is any web site that would qualify as Brutalist by this definition.

http://danluu.com/

Almost

Uses javascript at various point though.

Looks good in lynx

The second definition might be a site like 4chan, where signing a post via tripcodes makes the cryptographic signature visible to users, and people quote other posts by referring to the post number, possibly even the same as the post id in the database.

+1 to this analysis. The very first thing I thought of when I saw the title was [1]. Most of the examples in the article just confused me.

[1]: http://mlreference.com/

Since they are talking about departure from repetitive, orderly design maybe it should be called modernism. Or maybe they should drop the architecture analogy altogether, their point still stands though that the web is becoming so uniform that you need to look at the address bar to avoid confusion.

Craigslist is a great example of what actual brutalist design would look like on the web. Not the web, but ncurses and other cli like uis are probably brutalist.

The examples in the blog post don't strike me as brutalist at all. More like Swiss modern, which at this point has been done to death.

I think designers like the "clean" look but I find it to antiseptic and antihuman. Myspace was an example of a human (but not brutalist imho) design. Working in a hyper sterile environment as these designs all seem to me doesn't encourage creativity or jive with reality.

Wouldn't motherfuckingwebsite.com be the perfect distillation of the philosophy he's talking about?

Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's impossible for a web page or application to really be brutalist.

Web pages, and really everything on the computer screen are a rendering of something. They don't have materials or material properties, they only represent or imitate them. So really they can never be honest to the materials. They can only imitate or evoke 'ideas' of brutalism.

> Yeah, I think it's impossible for a web page or application to really be brutalist

Bare HTML with no styling (inline or CSS).

https://cran.r-project.org

It’s as close as anything I can think of. All function and little, if any, attempt at style.

> 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.

It's already been defined in the design community. Further, the post is well over a year behind common discussions on the return (not beginning) of Brutalism in web design.

Brutalism in web design has been around since the beginning. Professional designers, influenced by artists popular during the 70s & 80s (Warhol, Laurie Anderson, Sex Pistols) used this approach deliberately as a way to challenge the bland markup style of early Yahoo et al... and now today's modern flat design.

It's a style or a sensibility in other words. Gorgeous rawness—not just accidental rawness. Don't ever try to convince an architect of that, though.

Also anything to do with Linux kernel development, I've noticed, especially lwn.net and lkml.org.

On your last paragraph, I'm afraid that "web Brutalism" is already a parking lot. Anti-bourgeois? Really?

Brutalism is not about drabness, it's about the use of basic materials. Beyond that, I think a lot of what you ask appears to be an attempt to create a 1:1 relationship between the terms of an architecture (as defined by the article) and web design, which is a big ask.

I'm not sure there is any web site that would qualify as Brutalist by this definition.

maybe a page created on something like jsfiddle.

Heck, sincewe compile js now, you could say anything that still has readable source counts.

The problem is that the people who complain the most about the "bourgeoisie" are the bourgeoisie themselves. Everyone else is content to live their lives without denigrating people for actually knowing what they're doing.

Brutalism is stupid, anti-beauty, and destructive of mental health; which is why people who are just smart enough, and can afford too much beauty, thirst so much for it.

Wikipedia is the closest thing that comes to mind. Anything that lets you form edit through html in raw html, or liberal markdown.

Brutalist design encompasses both Craigslist and these examples. There are commonalities there, as well as differences.

such as?

Also Wikipedia and a certain tech-centric online forum, to an extent.

I thought the same thing. Actually I thought "no css", make it the way pages look when only the html loads.

> exposed structures and visible thought processes

If you press F12, it turns any website to a brutalist one

> And to the other definition, "exposed structures and visible thought processes," I'd point to...

Have you ever got a stacktrace in an http 500 error page? There you have it :)

I find JIRA also pretty “brutalist” in the style of Craigslist.

I like the word "brutal" in this context.

> 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...

What's brutal about that though? Instead of "design by committees", do it brutally.

Instead of A/B testing: throw it onto the screen.

Instead of slick: rough.

People will find the link that you want them to click, even when you are using design principles that are uncommon or "not like Google".

A long as you are honest. And perhaps also brutal.

brutalism as an architectural concept does not connote violence. le brutalisme comes from the word "raw" in french; "raw concrete", that is.

Seems more Bauhaus to me.

I think you hit it with "unconventional layouts" bit.

They're not neatly segregated along, with navigators aligned across the top or stacked on the left.

Visual artifacts are all over, controls are all over.

It's "brutalist" relative to the norm