I was blown away by the new Northwest Film Forum website: https://nwfilmforum.org/ Also, a link to Brutalism worth protecting of the concrete variety: http://www.sosbrutalism.org/cms/15802395
Sadly the Sirius building is likely to be torn down :-(
Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need
41–50 of 173 posts
Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need
#42A lot of those sites appear Brutalist, but open up their source and you can see they are still quite bloated. So they are just going for the look. Someone posted https://wiby.me on here regarding an article about old websites. This is an example of web brutalism, the site itself is basic but not ugly and there is practically nothing in the source that is going to slow down my machine. Hacker News is also a perfect example. Now one example from that article (https://theoutline.com/ which I picked randomly) has a 284kb CSS file in it. This is the norm, not the exception for most contemporary sites.
On my phone, I don't have much data for my plan. I have to be careful just visiting websites. Literally just visiting a few websites can cause me to download hundreds of megs...
Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need
#43I'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 pro…
> 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.
Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need
#44A lot of those sites appear Brutalist, but open up their source and you can see they are still quite bloated. So they are just going for the look . Someone posted https://wiby.me on here regarding an article about old websites. This is an example of web brutalism, the site itself is basic but not ugly and there is practically nothing in the source that is going to slow down my machine. Hacker News is also a perfect e…
That sort of makes sense though, if the design trend (whether you wanna call if 'brutalism' or just the form du jour), is more focused on the aesthetic rather than how it gets built. I suspect the adherents to this type of design would consider themselves designers, not developers, and thus are less concerned with bloat and file size.
Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need
#45I'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 pro…
> 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 durin…
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.
Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need
#46Brutalism seems like the wrong comparison to make with this new wave of design. The way I see it, brutalist websites would be websites with little or no CSS (see: http://www.motherfuckingwebsite.com/). They expose the "concrete of the web".
The examples in the article seem more punk, if anything. Which, that's cool too, but different. They actually require a lot of images and really tricky CSS to create that look, even if it's intentionally chaotic.
Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need
#47Please no. Branding through UX is bad UX. Simple, reliable, transferrable, easy to understand UX is good UX. Not everything has to be a billboard. I don't want a hammer where the handle is an iron rod embossed with the maker's logo. I just want an ergonomic wooden handle that does the job.
> Please no. Branding through UX is bad UX.
I agree.
> Simple, ..., transferrable, easy to understand UX is good UX.
I disagree. I think the first part of OP raised some good points. The copy everyone's copying and that everyone understand may just be an inferior local maxima.
I think this podcast gets at some of the lost potential: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/of-mice-and-men/
Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need
#48I 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…
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Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need
#49I think HN is better example of "brutalist" web design than most of the examples. Plain typefaces and colors, rigid lines and block-y structures. As for the bit about brutalism being "honest, unpretentious and anti-bourgeois" - LOL - the only people who actually rave about it as an aesthetic are the most pretentious people I know (not that there's anything wrong w/ that).
And "challenging" people or making them "uncomfortable" was never what the Brutalists were trying to do. They were utopians trying to build useful, life-improving structures unhampered by convention and superficial decoration. Any aesthetics had to come from the fundamental design and undisguised materials. Their designs often had a lot of practical problems, but they were never trying to be weird or off-putting for the sake of artiness. Hell, a lot of Brutalist buildings were the most functional, utilitarian structures you can picture.
This whole thing uses Brutalism as a clickbait buzzword; it has nothing to do with the principles.
A web site inspired by Brutalism would consist of the elements that the designer considered core to building it and avoid anything else. If CSS is not core, don't use it and instead rely on the browser styles. If JavaScript is core to function, use it. Etc.
Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need
#50Archived link since the site has been, ahem, brutalized: https://archive.fo/3W7yY There isn't really an argument for brutalism except laziness and the usual contempt the design community has for its end users. Minimalism has its place, as does maximalism, depending on the context within the application. But that requires actual thinking and then both taste and skill, respectively. Much easier to just wallow in contem…
Whas the site down?