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IMO, the cited examples are minimalist but not brutalist. When I think of a brutalist website I think of the design elements being exposed as part of the presentation. Frames and tables with exposed borders and ugly html buttons -- not, as suggested by the OP, clean layouts driven by an invisible style sheet.

A typical JavaDoc page for example, rather than Hacker News.

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I don't know that it has to be ugly. I think the good brutalist architecture is quite beautiful, as well as very pleasant to use (it's a misconception that brutalist design is meant to be _brutal_ towards it's users, although the bad stuff is -- and I think, maybe heretically, much of Le Corbusier is pretty bad).

When I think of brutalist, I think no frills, and putting the infrastructural elements forward, not covering them up with any surface-level aesthetics. Exposing the infrastructural bones, hiding nothing.

I don't think it's at all obvious what this means for a website. The very very abstract nature of all software makes it perhaps impossible to put the 'concrete' forward (double meaning intended, but primarily here as the opposite of 'abstract'), there's no there there. But I think it's interesting to think about, and the candidates listed there are contenders worth considering.

But there's a link to submit more, you should submit a JavaDoc page, I'm sure they'll list it too.

I think that the Windows mobile "Authentically Digital" aesthetic is something like that.

Glass skyscrapers meet those requirements but arent typically thought of as brutalist.

The word "brutalism" was coined from the French "béton-brut" meaning "raw concrete."

Brutalism is monolithic concrete forms like UK 70s tower blocks.

You appear to be thinking of exposed services of structural expressionism or Bowellism; like the Pompidou in Paris or Lloyd's building in London - they're not brutalism to my mind, far from it.

I'd associate it with exposed structural materials (no veneers out paneling) and a utilitarian aesthetic.

I'm familiar with brutalism. I think the ideology of the exposed structural materials is to show infrastructure without artifice. By "infrastructure" I don't just mean the electrical/plumbing or whatever as maybe hilighted in bowelism. The first definition of infrastructure in the random dictionary I looked up online is "the underlying foundation or basic framework."

As wikipedia says of brutalism, "There is often an emphasis on graphically expressing in the external elevations and in the whole-site architectural plan the main functions and people-flows of the buildings." Some have called brutalism the "truthful expression" of materials, structure, function.

I think it is interesting to think about how that might apply to web sites, it's not entirely clear to me.

Brutalist buildings don't need to be brutal, here's one of my favorites: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Geisel-L...

Many of the brutalist 70s tower blocks are wretched, but here's one I always liked: http://wibiti.com/images/hpmain/029/273029.jpg

I'm probably off the mark but a mirrored facade is a long way from brutalism to my view; the structure is certainly modernist but status too far from utilitarianism for me to call it brutalist.

Also, I like some of the brutalist 70s tower blocks too, in the right context (I'm quite fond of Goldfinger's Trellick), but your example seems to have too many ornamental curves to be brutalism (at least as far as that classification is used in the UK).

Which example? They're both widely known as brutalist examples here in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geisel_Library

http://chicagobrutalism.com/

I dunno, I guess it's "I know it when I see it", and we each know different things when we see them, heh.

I agree with other posters that this is a kind of minimalism. Brutalism comes from a literally concrete (the material) form of minimalism known as "Béton brut"[0] which led to Brutalism[1] - there is nothing brutal about these examples.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9ton_brut [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture

Agreed. I think more along the lines of http://thin.npr.org/

.. which is great & I wish more sites had a "thin" version.

This is great! I had no idea this even existed, but I agree, it would be great if many more sites offered something like this. Especially when on really slow connections, this would come in very handy.

That is beautiful. As someone who tries to browse without JavaScript as much as possible, and so frequently sees screwed-up layout, I instinctively scrolled down to see the 'real' content before realising—no, there it is!

In addition the page seems to be somewhat fixated with monospace fonts. Deliberately being 'edgy' by showing non-code in monospace isn't brutalist: Times New Roman is.

What the hell does edgy mean these days?

Doing things that have no point other than to raise attention. Eg, overriding browser defaults to showing paragraphs as monospace because code is cool, even though the site doesn't have any code.

I think monospace fonts look pretty

"Brutalist" is using typographic quotes on website about programming

Maybe I've spent too much time at a terminal, but I find monospace fonts quite readable and aesthetically pleasing (especially Anonymous Pro, Droid Sans Mono, and Source Code Pro).

Yeah, I'd call it vernacular rather than brutalist.

Olia Lialina wrote a nice article about her idea of a vernacular web. I'm not sure how compatible this is with your idea, but one thing that seems to distinguish these sites from her vernacular web is that they seem very thoughtfully and deliberately designed the way they are -- there is intent and purpose where in the vernacular web she sees happenstance and barely directed expression.

I agree.

I've always associated craiglist and 4chan with the brutalist movement.

4chan is quite "web2.0" for a board. BBS'es on 2ch.net could be better example, with their borer="1" tables, wall-of-text navigation, CGI scripts and adorable brick background

To piggy back off your point, the implication that the design of the Drudge Report (which I remember my father reading a decade ago) is almost certainly not "a reaction by a younger generation to the lightness, optimism, and frivolity of todays [sic] webdesign."

Indeed. The Drudge Report was already well-known in news junkie circles when it leaked Isikoff's Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky stunner in 1998!

The examples are a misappropriation of a 20th century aesthetic notion to web design.

There may be some similarities but, really, perhaps we need new terminology to describe these things ?

Web design and architecture are almost too easy to compare with the same language. They aren't directly comparable but the history seems to flow similarly.

If we consider the 90s web to be antiquity, and the gradients of the 2000s as the dark ages, then one could make the case that (starting with iOS 7) flat design is neo-classical, and the further movements to use a flat base but play with elements that pop out (https://stripe.com) is our version of baroque.

It's easy to notice these historical similarities, but unfortunately it also makes it easy to assign a style of web design to match a style of architecture, even if there is nothing truly comparable between the two.

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