No, the "bad influence" we all need is COLOR. I am so fed up with all of this meaningless "flat" design. It's awful. Our monitors are capable of making millions of colors. An icon can be more than white. This isn't paper and you aren't paying per color.
Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need
131–140 of 173 posts
Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need
#132Earlier 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.
Francophone here.
There is a difference between "Une brute" (a brute) and, as mentioned, "béton brut" (raw/rough concrete).
Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need
#133I've been in love with the Bloomberg redesign since it was launched, not sure I'd call it "brutalist" though. Strong/high-contrast, yes.
Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Or another way of putting it - it gets you an aesethetic balance between nature and this austere artificiality.
Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need
#135The article isn’t drawing a clear line between visual design and design patterns. Many people confuse UI and UX design. One is artistic (UI), the other one is based on cognitive science (UX).
UI will define the looks, the interface may be pretty or bold, but not necessarily usable and intuitive.
UX design will reduce the gap between human and machine by efficiently implementing design patterns, and user centered methodologies (human factors).
It’s expensive and challengjng to build a culture around design (Airbnb, Apple...) and build new patterns. It’s probably cheaper to just go Wild on the UI, not sure if that would stick though.
Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need
#136As 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!
Nice work. I see you used your CSS sparingly.
Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need
#137Brutalism was usually pretty functional. To compare mediocre web design to a widely respected (at least for the time) architectural movement is reaching.
Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need
#138Brutalism 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, e…
I think there is a difference between design that is deliberately raw, and something that hasn’t been designed at all.
Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here is an "exposed structures and visible thought processes," website: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com
Came here for this and to also link http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com
Off topic, but I don’t like the “improved” text color. Subjectively, viewing on an iPhone X, it just seems to make the text ever so slightly indistinct, harder to read.
I suspect this is partly due to the “True Tone” feature, where the OS automatically adjusts the display’s color temperature to match ambient light. This makes the “white” background color appear less harsh (less blue) than in most displays, lessening the need for a lighter foreground color to soften the appearance.
Or maybe you could just say that it reduces the perceived contrast, lessening the need for further contrast reduction. I’m not sure if that’s actually true, though. The actual contrast ratio between anything other than black and black should be infinity on an OLED display, or even if you account for a tiny amount of diffuse reflection of incoming light, it would just be a (large) value dependent on the brightness setting.
Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need
#140Here's a novel thought: maybe we're following Google and Apple's design frameworks because those frameworks provide the best ease of use, consistency, predictability, and usability to designers, which is the point of good UX? People who don't appreciate these things don't understand user experience applies to the process of design too?
I get that there's a point to individualism, being trendy, hip, new and having a brand. But to be brutally honest, brands these days are created through spoken narratives with their actions, their storytelling, and their advertising. I think most skilled designers learned that long ago - it's much more efficient to speak through the traditional mediums of color, graphics, stories, and text. You have to do a ton of work to create your own look and feel framework (most of it involving robust layouting, consistency, and thinking through a ton of edge cases - read the material docs from cover to cover to get a sense of how much decision making it is). While doing this, you have to balance both branding AND UX decisions(!). Sticking to using graphics, color, and text separates a lot of the branding vs UX concerns, and is much simpler to reason.
Unless you're a rock band or a creative agency, creating a novel new page styling is simply an inefficient use of time and money.