Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

Reminds me of the Adbusters Magazine I used to read as a kid. Philosophically and aesthetically brutalist and uncomfortable.

And yet for all its supposed innovation, web brutalistism still looks overly pretentious as it revels in its 'aesthetic' of psuedo-Swiss minimalism.

I'm sick of the garbage that designers these days pass off as 'form'. It ruins computing. Sci-fi showed us the future was large screens full of data and smart humans doing meaningful shit with it... but reality is we pay beaucorp bucks to waste 98% of a 4K, 9-megapixel display on a royal purple background with a couple of words in white.

Sounds to me more like a terrible idea that nobody needs.

I was impressed with the brutalist architecture, those plain concrete buildings have something about them that I can't place. Maybe like the old concrete tower hovering over the backdrop of a new, colorful, city? Something about it peeks your senses. As for the web design, it was also interesting. I liked some of the designs, others not so much. The website for zku:

http://www.zku-berlin.org

Something about that just feels comforting, if not nostalgic, like what you'd expect to see from an early 2000s webpage before things got fancy. I think what makes these sites pop for me is the contrast of colors, too much white ruins the effect. Having out of place, darker colors thrown in feels like its breaking the rules, in a good way.

When i think web-brutalism i do not think of anything illustrated in this article.

I think of (old) Reddit, Craigslist, this very "forum", and similar ones that are mostly text with minimal/no JS or graphics.