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Comment by sysbin | Hacker News Reader

devil's advocate: HN is very minimalistic with design.

HN is brutalist, meaning raw, unvarnished. There's no excessive whitespace and no animations. It's minimal in the correct sense: as simple as possible, but no more.

The problem with many sites is that they're actually quite complex behind a façade of simplicity. Which means lots of wasted space, unnecessary clicks, and not finding what you're looking for.

HN is not brutalist, as that's not what brutalist means. Brutalist things are made with concrete. HN is pared back.

I think HN is just "undesigned" to be honest. I mean, look at the stylesheet - aside from some declarations to use Verdana, a few minimal concessions towards a mobile layout, and a bit of fiddling about with the voting arrows, there's hardly anything there.

I'm sure at this point the minimalism of HN probably is a conscious choice (as in, they have consciously chosen not to do anything to the design for however many years, despite, I'm sure, countless offers from aspiring designers), but how it originally came out was surely as a result of the people involved not wanting to put any energy into designing it or writing CSS.

Interesting observations regarding the "raw" aspects of HN. I definitely see that too and I would refer to it as "Brutalist" in the true sense of the word, but these days Brutalism in digital design refers to various experimental projects [1]; I would consider these works to be leaning towards fine arts than calling them "unadorned".

[1] https://brutalistwebsites.com/

There is a difference, minimalism for the sake of minimalism is what I was referring to.

HN is minimal but functional first.

This guy minimalisms?

I disagree, HN is everything opposite of what was originally described. I can go look at youtube & come back to this site and see similarities with the design choice.

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