Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

The brutalist style works when it is the right design for the job, just shoehorning it for the sake of "design aesthetics" makes no sense. In fact it would work great for HN style webpages.

I run something similar - DiscoverDev ( https://discoverdev.io ) and got a lot of compliments on the "brutalist design". Then again it is a minimilist site, I really doubt this would work well for larger applications.

I actually really like the usage of borders in these "brutalist" designs. Current design trends seem to minimize or eliminate borders altogether, which makes it hard to visually separate content, which makes it hard for users to find the content they want. I thought I could browse through the text on these new sites faster because the borders were so much more prominent [0].

I think the random placement of links is a tricky thing though. One one hand it brings identity to your brand, but on the other hand, it’s not intuitive for the user.

[0] http://www.zku-berlin.org/, pkamb below also linked https://nwfilmforum.org/

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

Brutalism is, of course, a fuzzy (and contentious) label to begin with. But the article cites two interpretations of the term that we could use to evaluate how Brutalist a given design is:

honest, unpretentious and anti-bourgeois

and

a sense of roughness, exposed structures and visible thought processes

The problem is, I'm not seeing a lot of either of these in the examples provided.

If you asked me to name a site whose design is "honest, unpretentious and anti-bourgeois," for instance, examples that would leap to my mind are Craigslist and HN -- both of which focus on simple (even drab) layouts dominated by plain old text. But the examples are full of vibrant colors, big images and irregular, unconventional layouts! They're refreshing and interesting to look at, but that doesn't make them Brutalist.

And to the other definition, "exposed structures and visible thought processes," I'd point to... well, I'm not sure what I'd point to. I'm not sure there is any web site that would qualify as Brutalist by this definition. Are there any sites that let their plumbing hang conspicuously out on the sides? Bloomberg and Dropbox and the Outline certainly don't. I'd think of this more as a site where you interact with it via an API or the developer console or some heavy, overwhelming user interface than as a news site that happens to have decided to use giant fonts and screaming neon colors.

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 a parking lot for whatever trends happen to be fashionable at the moment, which is not a great way to build something that will make a lasting impact.

I guess I'm missing the connection on those websites to Brutalist architecture. It seems more like they're bored with regular design, and want to be more experimental.

It reminds conceptually more of Emigre magazine [1] or Ray Gun [2], where the design didn't have to be "readable".

    [1] https://www.emigre.com/Magazine
    [2] http://www.davidcarsondesign.com/t/tag/raygun/

This.

Brutalism is inherently utilitarian. Content over presentation.

IETF RFCs are brutalist.