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

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#101

Post by inostia » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 10:34 PM UTC

nostalgeek wrote: post #40

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'm confused. I don't see what makes most of the examples cited here "Brutalist" in any meaningful fashion. Because these examples have nothing to do with "brutalism" in architecture. It's just another buzzword misappropriated by (web) designers. 5 years ago everything was "flat" now everything is "brutalist" including what was "flat". Designers shouldn't pick a style because it's trendy, they should do their job a…

It also used to be called "anti-design". The concept has been around for a while. I really get annoyed when terms like "brutalism" are co-opted as yet another buzzword/trend/fad.

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#102

Post by purplezooey » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 10:37 PM UTC

Personally I miss Brutalist buildings. We build very cheaply and flimsy now, especially in the west, with 2x4 construction where you can hear everything happening in the building. Brutalist buildings made extensive use of concrete which we should use more of.

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#103

Post by offbytwo » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 10:42 PM UTC

_fh5n wrote: post #98

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…

> https://danielegrattarola.github.io/metaverse/

These are really cool, did you come up with that function for the mandelbrot set? Do you have an explaination of how it works??

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#104

Post by cwkoss » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 10:44 PM UTC

This article reads like it was written by a web designer who coined the usage of brutalism in the web space and uses it to try to sell themselves and differentiate their design work, even though their design isn't particularly unusual.

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#105

Post by cwkoss » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 10:46 PM UTC

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #57

SlapHappy wrote: post #39

I 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).

Describing a startup-happy billionaire-loving site like HN as "anti-bourgeois" is comical.

Describing any CSS style or design pattern as "anti-bourgeois" is comical.

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#106

Post by syndacks » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 10:48 PM UTC

Perhaps a bit off topic, meta even, but the design of the copy here (which borrows from Medium) ruins the experience for me. One shouldn't have to bold text or use quote type styling to make something stand out. Write engaging prose.

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#107

Post by cwkoss » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 10:48 PM 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.)

If the user can't see the UUIDs of every object rendered on the page and you are using a non-standard font, your design probably is not very Brutalist.

Brutalist UX is the apache webserver 404 page.

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#108

Post by cwkoss » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 10:53 PM UTC

tw1010 wrote: post #70

Convince me this isn't just a ploy by designers to justify their existence over templates.

"Hey, looks like your website isn't using the most cutting-edge design theory, because look at this one that I just made up"

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#109

Post by pbourke » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 10:59 PM UTC

aeneasmackenzie wrote: post #31

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…

Here is an "exposed structures and visible thought processes," website: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com

Came here for this and to also link http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#110

Post by lwansbrough » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 11:05 PM UTC

I think it's possible to create visually stunning and unique designs without relying on (IMO) low quality brutalism.

Take the following couple of sites as examples:

https://www.designbetter.co https://dropbox.design

I wholeheartedly agree that we should resist homogeny in product design.