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Neubrutalism is taking over the web?

hype4.academy

191–200 of 204 posts

Re: Neubrutalism is taking over the web?

#191
post #117

This style looks a bit like the "pop art" of the 80s with its hard colors and thick black borders. I suppose eventually you run out of design paradigms.

Right. When i hear "neobrutalism" i associate it with the looks of the ancient twm window manager as seen in this screenshot: https://xteddy.org/xwinman/screenshots/twm-system.gif Especially the "original" black and white background pattern of the X11 seems "raw" these days. Interestingly, the twm popup menu has a similar harsh shadow as proposed by the article.

Indeed, although in those days the hard shadows were due to technical issues (very limited colour depth). Sometimes you even had to swap palettes because they required different sets of the 256 available colours. You would click one program (xv - the picture viewer known as xview was a big candidate as it really needed to tailor its palette to show pictures decently) and all the others screwed up and vice versa.

32 bit full colour with alpha channel is amazing <3 Palettes were such a pain.

Re: Neubrutalism is taking over the web?

#192

I think neobrutalism is the wrong name. I think it gives it a gravitas that is undeserved. This is better described as word95 or ms-bobism. The colours, the style is firmly rooted in the mid 90s graphic design style of liberated desktop publishing. Brutalism was all about function over form, using concrete to make a space that is functional, large light and bright.

Yep, the new style is far more obviously inspired by 1990s design. Right down to the use of yellow. There was no such thing as “clashing” or “too high contrast” in the 1990s.

Another poster references Memphis design - that was a huge influence but there’s more going on. In the 1990s we also had desktop publishing tools in the hands of non-credentialed designers, but the resolution and color gamut of screen and page was low. So you had indie artists producing bold, simple shapes, indie cartoons, deconstructed typography.

The internet revolution created a market to synthesize these trends. The shock of the new was important. It got boiled down into a style which tried to be both as industrially loud as possible - high contrast, highly saturated colors - but also quirky, with little elements of cartoons or typography that seemed to be falling apart.

Differences: Web3 seems to stick with the bold sans-serifs that everything has been converging on. Possibly due to the need to look good on mobile. Also, the 90s loved acid green, perhaps because it almost transcended print. Web3 seems to like a saturated yellow, but not the brightest possible yellow - one that’s reminiscent of print!

I see a lot of the 90s in the web3 aesthetic. It might be nostalgia (a 30something designer has childhood memories of that time) but also they have the same goal: to shock people into paying attention, to appeal to youth, to create FOMO in the old in the middle of a gold rush.

Re: Neubrutalism is taking over the web?

#193
post #97

I would argue that the best designs are the ones that require the fewest alterations over time. Wikipedia, craigslist, HN, StackOverflow, Indeed, GitHub/GitLab, etc. arguably all fairly consistent while many other e-commerce sites, forums, social networks, job sites and so on have been all over the place and still hideous now. Yes, they've all had tweaks over the years but none have taken dramatic shifts or bent towa…

I love the craigslist UI. So simple and traditional, most 80 year olds can use it.

Re: Neubrutalism is taking over the web?

#194
post #186
post #19

I don't think the examples in the article are very good, there seems to be more of a retro 70s vibe / comic book vibe to it because of the roundness of fonts and borders along with polish. Brutalism is raw, cold and uncaring characterized by monumental structures sharp edges etc. In the context of web the rawness is a return to html and css (use of tables, links, buttons etc.) instead of slick widgets, stark contrast…

Well put, my thoughts exactly! I really wish we returned to brut (raw) web pages in general. Without JS, SPAs, etc.

I like the technological excess, but with good foundations, so a page's basic function should survive without JS etc.

Re: Neubrutalism is taking over the web?

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know, this argument seems to be losing validity. Couldn’t it be that industries that need lots of design for some other reason hire designers? That would be cause going the other way. > There is a fundamental form to daily objects that does not change or otherwise changes in leap steps often by completely depricating the old object. And this just doesn’t seem true at all. Should I hold these papers together w…

Taking your example a paper clip and a binder clip both have the same fundamental form you have to separate two parts of the thing that then squeeze the paper together. A stapler is a leap step in binding things, where an interely different fundamental form is used to permanently bind things. An air stapler has a different operating principle (I don't push a staple a pneumatic driver does it for me) but it is not fun…

Then it seems like you’ve just stated a tautology. Things don’t change unless they do.

Re: Neubrutalism is taking over the web?

#196
post #83

> "People simply get bored with how their apps and websites look after six to seven years. They need a change" Real world objects rarely change design because of the costs involved. When they do, the change needs to justify that cost. For example, I'm not going to change the buttons on my microwave because I'm "bored" with them. The costs of changing software design is far less impractical and expensive, and therefor…

> Real world objects rarely change design because of the costs involved What an astonishing claim. Fashion is too easy, you could maybe wiggle away from clothes not being "objects in the real world" although I assure you the Emperor aside they are exactly that. How about cars?

The design of a given artefact in the real world won't change unless specifically acted on. A garment, or an automobile, or a building remains as it was originally designed, modulo wear, until and unless it is altered, modified, or renovated.

With digital artefacts, especially SAAS, where each individual use is fetched anew from a server, there's no such material stability.

Product lines are subject to revision, though even here, changes seem to follow marketing rather than functional logic. This is especially true when comparing, say, industrial vs. consumer products, particularly those with a common underlying design or base.

Examples which come to mind are Hobart vs. KitchenAid mixers (both manufactured by the same company), consumer automobiles vs. the Checker Taxicab. The last production year of Checker, 1982, could have graced a dealer's lot in the late 1940s:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Checker_...

Commercial jet airliners have seen at best marginal evolution since the introduction of the 707 in 1958 (and arguably for a decade prior to that). More recent design changes have finally begun to emerge largely thanks to advances in materials technology. Yes, there's been a great deal of change in avionics, flight control systems, overall infrastructure, and powerplants, but the overall design of a sausage on wings with gets slung from wings or fixed to the fuselage has remained fundamentally unchanged, largely due to laws of aerodynamics.

Railroad oil tank cars strongly resembling the present-day DOT-111 standard emerged by the late 1860s. It turns out that there are only so many viable arrangements of material for handling bulk liquids on standard-gague rails given car dimensions, curve radius, braking, bogey capacity, and the like.

The modern high-tension electric transmission line pylon dates to the early 20th century. It was the failure of what seems to have been an orginally-installed hanger hook which seems to have precipitated the 2018 Camp Fire in California, responsible for destroying the town of Paradise, CA, amongst numerous others.

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/hook-on-pge-tower-eyed...

https://blog.thinkreliability.com/case-study-californias-dea...

Clothing, particularly in an age of disposable ("fast") fashion does change quickly, yes. But that's through continued iteration and replacement of individual items, not, generally, by the repurposing of existing garments (accessorising and similar modifications excepted).

Matter has persistence. Digital does not.

Re: Neubrutalism is taking over the web?

#197

> Brutalism is a 1950’s architectural trend that was abandoning all decorations, and creating brutally simple buildings made from concrete. They often weren’t even painted to emphasize their brutal nature. So big, brutal blocks of concrete. > It was the architects showing they were bored with the status-quo and trying something different. That feels very similar to the current search for the UI trend to take over des…

And "brutal" similarly comes from "coarse, brutal, raw, crude".

The etymologies diverge for a bit, but come from the same root.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/brute

Re: Neubrutalism is taking over the web?

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, brutalism is concerned with total utilitarianism and a complete lack of artifice (the material is irrelevant, although a lot of brutalist architecture is made from concrete). It contrasts itself with minimalism by taking it to the extreme and creating an almost anti-human aesthetic. This makes it appropriate for buildings that are looking to evoke anti-human ideals; churches and monasteries (divinity of God…

> Correct, brutalism is concerned with total utilitarianism and a complete lack of artifice but, every brutalist structure i’ve had the displeasure to work in sucked for humans to occupy and interact with. They completely prioritize artifice over functional matters.

Yup, that's the after effect of being anti-human in ideal. It results in a building that it sucks to be in.

Re: Neubrutalism is taking over the web?

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, brutalism is concerned with total utilitarianism and a complete lack of artifice (the material is irrelevant, although a lot of brutalist architecture is made from concrete). It contrasts itself with minimalism by taking it to the extreme and creating an almost anti-human aesthetic. This makes it appropriate for buildings that are looking to evoke anti-human ideals; churches and monasteries (divinity of God…

>This makes it appropriate for buildings that are looking to evoke anti-human ideals; churches and monasteries Have you seen an actual monastery? An actual old church (at least 700 years) kept in its original style? They are as far as you can get from just utilitarian, to the point that they are impractial in many ways. Nobody needs, or have any use for, a 120 foot ceiling, except to impress visitors by showing them…

I'm talking about brutalism as a chosen approach for an architect and where that approach is most appropriate for a building. It doesn't mean that all churches or monasteries should be brutalist (obviously), I'm saying it's one of the use cases for a new piece of architecture where brutalism makes sense.

Re: Neubrutalism is taking over the web?

#200
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, brutalism is concerned with total utilitarianism and a complete lack of artifice (the material is irrelevant, although a lot of brutalist architecture is made from concrete). It contrasts itself with minimalism by taking it to the extreme and creating an almost anti-human aesthetic. This makes it appropriate for buildings that are looking to evoke anti-human ideals; churches and monasteries (divinity of God…

> brutalism is concerned with total utilitarianism and a complete lack of artifice That would be functionalism. > It contrasts itself with minimalism by taking it to the extreme and creating an almost anti-human aesthetic. Exactly, and this anti-human aesthetic, inhumanity, intimidation implies that the building must have an emotional or aesthetic impact on the visitor, which is in conflict with the proclaimed utilit…

An architectural style can do more than one thing, i.e. it can be both utilitarian in its aesthetic and also be anti-human in its output. Philosophically, I'm not sure these are mutually exclusive but I suppose that's debatable.
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