Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need • Hacker News Board

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#121

Post by erikpukinskis » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 12:20 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #93

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.)

That’s just not true, HTML has natural spacing, fonts, etc. What’s the least amount of code you could possibly write that functions? That’s going to be the most “minimalist“ design.

box-shadow: black is less bits of information than box-shadow: 2px 4px 0.5em 0.2em rgba(100,55, 45, 0.9)

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#122

Post by saltcured » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 12:31 AM UTC

azernik wrote: post #115

daotoad wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why brutalist architecture works best when it includes large windows and sky lights. What makes the brutalist buildings in the Pacific Northwest beautiful is that many of them are now covered in vegetation, with mosses or vines muting their harshness. That said, this so-called "brutalist web design" is bullshit. It's just avant-garde design of the 80s applied to web pages.

There were a whole bunch of such buildings on the UC Berkeley campus, and one was allowed to be covered with vines like that - absolutely gorgeous.

I think there is something aesthetically pure about those big concrete monoliths in a setting like Berkeley, or further north, where you can seem them in dense fog and smell fir trees at the same time. They start to remind you of tall cliffs and cave dwellings, rather than childrens' toys strewn on carpet.

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#123

Post by niftich » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 12:33 AM UTC

baud147258 wrote: post #119

niftich wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then again, the label 'brutalist' is fraught with conflated interpretations that to some followed logically, yet in other contexts they appear to be in conflict. From the very beginning, the term sprung out of linguistic confusion between French and English [1], where Le Corbusier's French descriptor for 'raw concrete' was lost in translation and reinterpreted by English commentators as brutal, then art imitated life…

>Le Corbusier's French descriptor for 'raw concrete' was lost in translation and reinterpreted by English commentators as brutal, I always thought that argument as flimsy, since the word brute exists in French and has exactly the same meaning as in English.

FWIW I'm recounting his own perspective [1], sourced [2][3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12685595#12689331 [2] https://f50collective.com/2016/09/19/brutalist-architecture/ [3] https://books.google.com/books?id=b-OUxSelykIC&lpg=PA18&ots=...

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#124

Post by rayiner » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 12:39 AM UTC

erikpukinskis wrote: post #121

rayiner wrote: post #93

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.)

That’s just not true, HTML has natural spacing, fonts, etc. What’s the least amount of code you could possibly write that functions? That’s going to be the most “minimalist“ design. box-shadow: black is less bits of information than box-shadow: 2px 4px 0.5em 0.2em rgba(100,55, 45, 0.9)

But those are arbitrary design choices too, just default ones. They don’t reflect the underlying functional structure of the page.

Brutalist architecture is intended to reflect the functional structure of the building. That concrete is there for functional reasons; it is sized for functional reasons such as holding up the wall. Concrete is used because it’s a functionally versatile material. All that functional purpose is exposed.

Brutalist web design might be something like showing the DOM without styling it. In a Lisp context, it’s be like showing raw s-expressions as output.

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#125

Post by doomlaser » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 12:57 AM UTC

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…

Wikipedia is the closest thing that comes to mind. Anything that lets you form edit through html in raw html, or liberal markdown.

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#126

Post by kroltan » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 1:05 AM UTC

As a shameless self-plug, I was inspired by http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ for my personal website: https://kroltan.github.io/

I did not go all the way, however. The site is still 11kB plus a 16kB non-essential image. It has quite a bit more than 7 CSS declarations. I did not minify the markup like Better M* Website.

Any feedback is welcome, however!

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#127

Post by kevin_thibedeau » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 1:06 AM UTC

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…

Seems more Bauhaus to me.

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#128

Post by erikpukinskis » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 1:11 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #124

erikpukinskis wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s just not true, HTML has natural spacing, fonts, etc. What’s the least amount of code you could possibly write that functions? That’s going to be the most “minimalist“ design. box-shadow: black is less bits of information than box-shadow: 2px 4px 0.5em 0.2em rgba(100,55, 45, 0.9)

But those are arbitrary design choices too, just default ones. They don’t reflect the underlying functional structure of the page. Brutalist architecture is intended to reflect the functional structure of the building. That concrete is there for functional reasons; it is sized for functional reasons such as holding up the wall. Concrete is used because it’s a functionally versatile material. All that functional purpo…

Sure, and the grit of clay at a specific location is arbitrary too, but if that’s the material you have to work with, then that’s the material.

I think you’re being too literal about what constitutes material. You think only something the level of hardware or a programming language is “material” and everything above that is arbitrary, but I would argue ALL of the layers of the stack constitute material properties.

How about this: form submission. You don’t need it... you can use Ajax. But forms that can be submitted will work in more environments (no JavaScript, forward and back navigation, etc)

You can fight that current, but the underlying technology wants you to use forms.

I’m not really arguing about Brutalism though, so much as modernism. A modern web page would contain a minimum of changes to what the basic simplest HTML would yield. You start from the raw material with all its idiosyncrasies and you only add a dimension of “designed stuff” when you have a specific articulable rationale for it.

(This is totally different from the colloquial definition of “modern web applications” which are anything but respectful of their materials)

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#129

Post by krrrh » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 1:37 AM UTC

kaiby wrote: post #14

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…

In the late nineties I had the impression that Shepard Fairey’s original Mozilla logo really set the tone for thick border design. So many influential web designers frequently spent time on the site, and it felt like a thousand thick border stylesheets bloomed across the web for a few years.

https://web.archive.org/web/20000229231038/http://www.mozill...

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#130

Post by rayiner » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 1:45 AM UTC

erikpukinskis wrote: post #128

rayiner wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But those are arbitrary design choices too, just default ones. They don’t reflect the underlying functional structure of the page. Brutalist architecture is intended to reflect the functional structure of the building. That concrete is there for functional reasons; it is sized for functional reasons such as holding up the wall. Concrete is used because it’s a functionally versatile material. All that functional purpo…

Sure, and the grit of clay at a specific location is arbitrary too, but if that’s the material you have to work with, then that’s the material. I think you’re being too literal about what constitutes material. You think only something the level of hardware or a programming language is “material” and everything above that is arbitrary, but I would argue ALL of the layers of the stack constitute material properties. Ho…

You’re conflating minimalism with Brutalism. Brutalism is about design exposing functionality. Lots of layers in the stack expose functionality (hardware, the OS, the DOM), but presentation is design, not functional. You could switch the default font from one thing to another with zero functional effect.