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Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

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Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#91

Post by GuB-42 »

smacktoward wrote: post #16

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 pro…

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

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#92

Post by toddmorey »

Is this just a new type of monotony though? Look at the sites in these two rows from the Brutalist Websites collection (1 & 2 below).

My favorite of the entire set is the ZK/U site, as it has strong borders and contrast and other elements of this new langauge, but not at the expense of being easy to use and navigate.

[1] http://osscreenshots.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/bruatalist1.... [2] http://osscreenshots.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/brutalist2.p...

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#93

Post by rayiner »

The idea of web pages as Brutalist is ironic. Brutalism was a movement meant to not hide structural concrete or make it look like something else. The concept has no meaningful analogy on the web, where no style that showstopper the raw structure (because there is no visible structure, it’s all equally arbitrary.)

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#95

Post by EGreg »

Designers have fads. Why should the rest of us care and go along with their designs trends and counter reactions?

For many business minded people, it’s about what’s most useful and pleasant for our USERS, not about satisfying their collective art fetishes.

PS: I miss skeumorphism and the ability to quickly differentiate content areas from controls.

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#96

Post by iambateman »

The author made a few points I thought were odd (“web design is now brutalist, which is Neoflat but also good”) but one point that seems helpful:

Graphic designers have, in fact, shrugged off individuality in favor of convention in the name of usability.

Is the design universe bent toward homogeny? I mean, look at cars or houses. Is everything destined to come in 4 colors, 3 models and a trim package?

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#97

Post by tgb »

scott113341 wrote: post #52

This is a fun website to peruse every once in a while: http://brutalistwebsites.com/ Its submission from 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11517491

In what ways are these "brutalist"? The first two I clicked on had (in one) music auto-playing over a video with your mouse pointer a Terminator-style claw and (in the other) a 3D animated leg that you could spin before hitting 'access' to get to the actual site. These aren't brutalist, they're the trying-too-hard-to-be-cool teenager phase.

[1] http://gregroque.com/#/home [2] https://heel.zone

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#98

Post by _fh5n »

Key points that we can take away from this article:

1. Brutalist design means having huge-ass boxes floating around, with cool animations, sans-serif fonts, all powered by 500MB of JS libraries

2. Dropbox is exactly the same as it has been for the last 10 years, they just conformed to the ubiquitous standard of modern web design, and redid their logo to be EXACTLY like the logos of all the other tech companies in the world: sans-serif font, simple stylized icon

Good read.

As a side node, I think that this experiment I did on my blog a while back accidentally matches the definition of brutalism better than the examples in the article: https://danielegrattarola.github.io/metaverse/

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