Neubrutalism is taking over the web? | Hacker News Reader

Neubrutalism is taking over the web?

hype4.academy

162 pointsmethyl198 comments

> 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.

The word "brut" came from French "Béton brut" which means "raw concrete" — has nothing with how "brutal" we perceive it to be.

There's lots of architecture articles covering this but basically, the author hasn't done their research: https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/Brutalism

Upvote from a Champagne drinker ;)

Pah, neobrutalism is just sparkling concrete.

I'm sick of hearing this, it was obviously a double meaning from the start. They revelled in how brutal it was.

I'm no expert in architecture history, but I don't think it is so obvious. Le Corbusier's projects such as the Cité Radieuse or the Plan Voisin, which largely defined modernism, seem to me to be quite clearly the starting point of early brutalism, which didn't look all that brutal. Le Corbusier is also the source of the "béton brut" phrase, apparently.

What I'm annoyed by is the assumption that "brutal" only means violent. Brute-dull, stupid. Brutal honesty-direct and unvarnished honesty.

> the Plan Voisin, which largely defined modernism, seem to me to be quite clearly the starting point of early brutalism, which didn't look all that brutal.

“Raze a third of Paris, it is Too Messy!” isn’t “all that brutal”?

Apologies if it was unclear, I meant that Le Corbusier's projects together largely defined modernism, rather than just the Plan Voisin.

The Plan was more or less a marketing scheme. It brought attention to the problems modernism was to solve: it was large-scale, clean, egalitarian, bright, full of greenery, and paid attention to transportation — all things Paris had issues with at the time. (1920s Paris still had slums!)

in that case, why it is called 'brutalism' instead of 'brutism' ? I'm not implying you are wrong, but probably it's the reason of confusion:

* brutal - brutalism

* brut - brutism

Ask Hans Asplund:

> The term Nybrutalism (New Brutalism)[16] was coined by the Swedish architect Hans Asplund to describe Villa Göth, a modern brick home in Uppsala, designed in January 1950[9] by his contemporaries Bengt Edman and Lennart Holm.[10]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture#History

> Asplund's neologism caught on in Stockholm and was picked up by British architectural pilgrims to that city, among them Oliver Cox, Graeme Shankland and Michael Ventris, the decoder of Linear B (an ancient script seen as one of the great linguistic riddles). Although the epithet signified nothing, or maybe because it signified nothing, it was taken up as a slogan of defiance or something by arty young British architects, none artier than Alison and Peter Smithson and their representative on Earth, Reyner Banham, an architectural critic whose prose may cause all but the entirely insentient to wince.

* https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/feb/13/jonatha...

Or Reyner Banham why he chose that name in his 1955 essay:

> They have created the idea of a Modern Movement – this was known even before Basil Taylor took up arms against false historicism – and beyond that they have offered a rough classification of the ‘isms’ which are the thumb-print of Modernity into two main types: One, like Cubism, is a label, a recognition tag, applied by critics and historians to a body of work which appears to have certain consistent principles running through it, whatever the relationship of the artists; the other, like Futurism, is a banner, a slogan, a policy consciously adopted by a group of artists, whatever the apparent similarity or dissimilarity of their products. And it is entirely characteristic of the New Brutalism – our first native art-movement since the New Art-History arrived here-that it should confound these categories and belong to both at once.

* https://www.architectural-review.com/archive/the-new-brutali...

It opens with an epigraph by Le Corbusier:

> L’Architecture, c’est, avec des matières bruts, ètablir des rapports émouvants’rnouvants.

(Architecture is, with raw materials, establishing moving and moving relationships.)

It's maybe just a trivial reason like it sounded better to the person who initially coined the word.

The postfix -al in English means "of or pertaining to". It comes from Middle English, from either Latin or French, possibly from Etruscan before that. It's often added to nouns to make an adjective form. The postfix -ism (from Ancient Greek) is a suffix added to the end of a word to indicate that the word represents a specific practice, system, or philosophy, often political ideologies or artistic movements. It suggests the word is related to a belief accepted as an authority by a group or school of thought.

The word brutal comes from Medieval Latin brutalis ("savage, stupid"), from Latin brūtus ("dull, stupid"). The English use of the word has a particular connotation/definition that differs from both the French and original Latin.

The French word brut comes from Middle French, from Old French, from the Latin brūtus (“heavy, dull”). Today it means either "raw", "strong", or "gross" ("big, thick, large, stout", "whole, entire, overall, total, aggregate").

The word brutalism could translate as "a system, belief, or artistic movement, of or relating to, a whole/entire, dull/big/thick stupid/savage aggregate". Doesn't make for a great definition.

However, that's not the whole story.

The word brutalism was coined first by Swedish architect Hans Asplund in 1950 as nybrutalism. It described a home Villa Göth (built by Bengt Edman and Lennart Holm) made using red brick - not concrete. In 1955, British journalist Reyner Banham popularized an essay called “The New Brutalism,” in which he used the brick-and-steel Hunstanton School (by architects Peter and Alison Smithson) as an example of this new form. The point was to stretch Modernism even further, but concrete was not (yet) involved.

In 1966, in French architectural critic Reyner Banham's book "The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic?", he redefined the word by suggesting that brut was a French pun, combining the meanings of "béton brut" and "brutal". 16 years after the coining of nybrutalism, the term's use became linked to concrete.

So really, the word originated as a reference to the the raw edges of an extended Modernist design, and then was reinterpreted as a pun relating to raw concrete, and then the English who weren't aware of this pun simply assumed it related to the brutality of the buildings' aesthetics.

ps. brutism would (without a different explicit definition, use, or origin) be the same word as brutaism, just without the "of or pertaining to" postfix. English has thousands of words which have different spellings and the same meaning. You can replace the -al postfix with -ition or -ision and it means the same thing (disposition/disposal=dispose, proposition/proposal=propose, submission/submittal=submit, transmission/transmittal=transmit). But not in all cases, as some forms end up having a different origin (reversion/reversal=revert,reverse).

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 over the profanity of man), as well as many governmental buildings of the period (intimidation and hopefully an inhuman/machine-like approach to orderliness and bureaucracy)

> 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.

I often find brutalist buildings to be comfortable and inspiring.

There are a number of brutalist academic libraries that I find delightful to be inside of, using them for library purposes. Somehow it's a style suited for libraries?

I went to school here, and this one from the OUTSIDE I don't love, but on the INSIDE it's actually a delightful place to read, browse the stacks, study, or nap. And has been beloved by generations of students. https://www.oberlin.edu/mudd-center

University Library at Northwestern University, I find lovely outside as well as pleasant inside: https://www.library.northwestern.edu/ (There are some alternate entrances and terraces which are closed due to notions of "security" in a facility like this, but which would make it even more pleasant and human-oriented if open. I guess that is then one way it's design ended up incompatible with at least current usage demands. I'm curious if they were open to patrons when the building first opened).

You may be right. My hometown's library and civic center (pool, gym, meeting rooms) are brutalist, and I always found them delightful.

The first modernist architects were implicitly working with a theory that simply highlighting the "raw" use of new, high-tech materials like metal or concrete would result in an enjoyable, decorative look. They weren't necessarily going for a "brutal" appearance, that was more of an unintended consequence that only became clear in retrospect.

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

> 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 utilitarianism. So brutalism in this sense is already moving away from purely functional/utilitarian architecture.

They are not unrelated. As I've always understood it, brutalism was definitely about avoiding artifice, and exposing functional elements.

Wikipedia seems to agree. (An encyclopedia is a pretty good place to go for a common starting point when we're talking about what a term like this means!)

> Brutalist buildings are characterised by minimalist constructions that showcase the bare building materials and structural elements over decorative design…

> New Brutalism is not only an architectural style; it is also a philosophical approach to architectural design, a striving to create simple, honest, and functional buildings that accommodate their purpose, inhabitants, and location. Stylistically, Brutalism is a strict, modernistic design language that has been said to be a reaction to the architecture of the 1940s, much of which was characterised by a retrospective nostalgia.[29] Peter Smithson believed that the core of Brutalism was a reverence for materials, expressed honestly…

> A common theme in Brutalist designs is the exposure of the building's inner-workings—ranging from their structure and services to their human use—in the exterior of the building…

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

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.

> it can be both utilitarian in its aesthetic and also be anti-human in its output

What I am trying to say is that its 'anti-human' aesthetic is in conflict with professed utilitarism, because it adds elements that are superfluous to the utility. And I think for a part of brutalist architecture this is pretty clearly a break with functionalism/modernism and a precursor (one of many) to postmodern architecture. But I'll leave this to the experts.

>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 the glory of God. Nobody needs the entire outside of the building having a row of stone Gargoyles hand carved in the smallest details, but they are there.

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.

Indeed. It has more to do with crude as in crude oil.

But as a consequence of this style buildings have a brutal feel to it.

The English word brutal comes from French or medieval Latin brutalis, brutus, meaning dull, stupid. Hence the word "brute". Savagely violent is only one of the meanings of the adjective. It also means "punishingly hard or uncomfortable" or "direct and lacking any attempt to disguise unpleasantness". These latter two meanings of "brutal" seem particularly apt to describe this architectural style; in fact it seems to mirror in the original meaning of "Béton brut" (though I am no speaker of French, so some nuance may be escaping me).

So, I'm really not sure that we've gained anything by this "debunking".

So "beton brut" or "cidre brut" (dry cider) refer to the concrete's or cider's dullness or stupidity? No, they refer to their rawness and crudeness. The original commentor was spot on.

By the way, a more complete set of the meanings of Latin brūtus is heavy, unwieldy, dull, stupid, brutish.

"punishingly hard or uncomfortable" or "direct and lacking any attempt to disguise unpleasantness"

Taking brute to mean "unrefined", you can see that it fits into both those definitions and scenarios just fine.

An unrefined person is dull, stupid, or violent; an unrefined product is raw, crude, or lacking polish.

Nope. Brutalism refers to concrete, full stop. The author clearly hasn't done due diligence.

It's originally a tongue-in-cheek term, first popularized by British Architects Allison and Peter Smithson. The double entendre was not lost on them. Architects have a sense of humour too.

Yes, there is no reason that English speakers would adopt "brutalist" merely because some French speaking people used the word "brut" to describe it. People are thinking too narrowly about how and why words are used, names given and popularized.

I see it is a common experience for someone learning a new language as an adult to find the new language they're learning beautiful, because of all the new connections between words and roots... "oh, it's neat how this word for 'child' is from an old root word for 'love', oh it's neat that this word for 'afraid' also carries the connotations of 'dark cave'", etc.

It's easy to miss that your birth language has all the same associations. You just learned it and deeply internalized it at a time when you missed that sort of thing. Look at it with fresh eyes and a bit of study and you may be surprised at what similar beauty lies within it.

And this is a good example. Yes, the denotation of the English word "brutal" and the architecture term "brutalism" may not be directly connected. But the words considered as a whole are connected, across a family of related European languages, with rich associations going back centuries. It is far from merely "coincidence" that the words are so related. It can be helpful and informative to know that the denotations aren't as related as they may look, but trying to tell people that they're completely unrelated terms is incorrect. There is a complicated, interesting, and even in its own way, beautiful connection between brutalism as an architectural style and brutal as an adjective.

True, I was thinking about that too.

But one aspect of brutalist architecture is "showing how it's made", making infrastructure visible, making structural apparatus visible. And making raw materials visible for what they are, not trying to make them look like something they're not. That's part of it's "rawness" too, as I've always understood it -- it's not just about using concrete.

That part does seem to some extent apply to what's being called here "neobrutalism" in the web. Stark obvious borders and shadows, instead of subtle gradients that blend in and don't draw your attention to them, or which give you photographic or realistic effects to imitate something they're not. Emphasizing the "computer-y-ness" of what you're looking at. Skeuomorphic tries to look like something other than it is; minimalist design hopes you don't think about what the thing is made of at all to distract you from the information -- but this design we're talking about instead intentionally reminds you that you are looking at a computer screen. That's an honest similarity to brutalism maybe.

So, as an appreciator of architectural brutalism, from the headline (and not knowing much about the web design 'trend') I came prepared to make your point... by the end I was begrudgingly saying, meh, okay, fine, close enough. It does draw your attention to the "way it's made" similar to what I understand as actually one of the core values of architectural brutalism; as well as being kind of a challenge to more polite notions of aesthetics in a way that's similar to brutalism's effect even if it's not what the word "brutal(ism)" was actually meant for (although in English at least I think the 'misunderstanding' may not have been wholly unknown/unintentional originally). I guess it's close enough, I'll allow it, I don't need to pick this fight. (although I too wish the author had talked a bit more accurately about architectural brutalism). (On the other hand this design stuff also has lots of non-functional even playful decorative elements, which is contrary to architectural brutalism).

> Stark obvious borders and shadows, instead of subtle gradients that blend in and don't draw your attention to them.

The drawback is that in most cases you'd want to draw attention to the actual content, not the appearance of the page. Starker contrast is sensible for page elements that the user can meaningfully interact with, but ISTM that the "claymorphism" style is more effective at managing that trade-off.

Well, yeah, I don't honestly love the examples on this page of this 'trend'! (I'm also in my mid-40s, I suspect this is a young person's thing).

I'm just saying it's one commonality with architectural brutalism (for better or worse, in either case) that can justify the term. Separate consideration to whether we like the design or think it's effective!

I think that context matters. Coming out of the 1940's, where fascism preyed on nostalgia and fear, brutalism brings forward a concept of the future that is both fearless and lacks nostalgia. Not seeing the world through your imagination of how you want to see it, but how it really is. Unlike Albert's Spear's or Mussolini's Roman and Greek inspired pieces (setting EUR aside), a brutalist view is honest, simple, and looking forward. There are, of course, counter-examples like the Eastern European memorials - which sometimes favored a heavy grandeur.

My take on this is that designers look at something like a concrete building and thing "big", "ugly", "no-like" and then make something that rejects the current overly-clean, friendly design of most sites. It's not brutalist in the sense it is trying to move to a vision of the future free from deception and nostalgia, it's more dank basement bar and garage band esthetic. Some of those sites look like they could be the covers of 1980 punk or new-wave albums. I could see some of it on a Dickies album cover or promoting some 1982 art-house film about sadistic chipmunks.

Good points. There's probably no way for any contemporary design to capture that historical contextual element of brutalism (or modernism in general), that was a stance particular to that period of time, you can't have that same stance toward the past/future now with an extra 100 years of past behind us and what has happened in it...

(And of course it should be said that both Italian and German fascist architecture could also be big into modernism, and a "concept of the future that is fearless", and even in some ways "lacks nostalgia". Fascism is nothing if not contradictory.)

I still think there's something notable about the "draw attention to it being a computer screen" that is notable about the designs in OP -- that OP doesn't actually discuss much -- whether or not we call it "brutalism". Interestingly though, I also want to say it kind of wants to draw attention to it's artificiality in a way that seems very contrary to brutalism. Perhaps since the computer screen is such an artificial "simulacrum" kind of environment in the first place, to draw attention to it's true nature is to promote a kind of artificiality, when to draw attention to the true nature of a physical building was in the 20th century thought of as a dismissal of artifice.

Anyway, this is maybe getting pretty far afield, but interesting stuff!

> Coming out of the 1940's, where fascism preyed on nostalgia and fear, brutalism brings forward a concept of the future that is both fearless and lacks nostalgia.

Ah, that explains why brutalist buildings look so much like all those concrete bunkers and flak towers that Germany built during the war. It all makes sense now.

For architects this is a popular shibboleth. If you imply that "brutalism" is related to "brutal" then you'll be perceived as an outsider that doesn't have any real design knowledge.

This is like implying Java and JavaScript are related.

Of course the real thing to know here on Javascript is that they are related. Eich's crazy scripting language "Livescript" was going to exist independently, but then there was a chance to ride on the coattails of the Java enthusiasm, to do that it needed the inappropriate name, and it needed syntax that looks enough like a semicolon language even though it's a Lisp.

Some of the obvious defects in Javascript are (at least if you believe people who were there) excused because Brendan had a tight deadline to ship this or else Netscape would go with the plan where Sun's Java is more closely integrated instead of Eich's Lisp scripting. Every day spent making Javascript less awful is additional risk an executive says no, we are going with Sun on this, stop work on Javascript.

I don't know if there's an equivalently nuanced story for Brutalism.

You’re missing my point. Perhaps I should’ve said “interchangeable” instead of “related”. My point is that it makes you an outsider. A recruiter that assumes you know JS simply because you know Java is quickly dismissed for good reason—despite any historical merit.

This is similar in architecture circles. If you mix up “brutal” with “brutalism” you’ll be perceived as a clueless outsider. I’m sure there are architects out there that argue they are related, but without addressing this faux pas head on it makes the author seem ignorant.

I’m married to an architect and have seen this dynamic played out a few times. If you want to make an architect cringe: call brutalism “brutal”.

> I’m sure there are architects out there that argue they are related, but without addressing this faux pas head on it makes the author seem ignorant.

That's exactly what I was getting at. Every discipline is like this.

If some nutjob tries to argue with my pathologist friend N that actually the proteins in your food change your DNA, the nutter is going to have a bad time because that's lunacy.

But if N is talking over dinner with another biologist who maybe got her PhD at a different institution, and in the course of conversation the other biologist says she doubts the central dogma (the "central dogma" of molecular biology is that the nucleic acid sequences make proteins, but the proteins don't make nucleic acid sequences, sometimes over-simplified as DNA->RNA->Protein) then N is not going to react the same way, because even though it's apparently the same idea as the nutter, the context is different.

The central dogma seems plausible to me (as a lay person), but popular simplifications are now known to be definitely wrong, so who knows, at least it should have a more defensible name, (apparently Crick did not know what the word "dogma" exactly means and was just looking for synonyms for "hypothesis") as of course if it does fail you can expect the first sort of nutter will feel vindicated.

In the context of "I too have a PhD in this discipline" doubts about the dogma (ignoring for a moment that in its technical sense you can't doubt a dogma that's the whole point) seem rational, while in the context of "A Big Mac can change your DNA" it's insane.

Likewise I'm sure that in the context of basically "I hate all this old concrete crap" pointing out that Brutalism is related to the word "Brutal" just gets you dismissed -- but in the context of arguing about the relative merits of Wyndham Court and the tower block "extension" to South Stoneham House in my city, it doesn't seem so unreasonable to observe that what people didn't like about these two structures wasn't so much their Brutalist architecture as the Brutal reality of living in them...

>This is like implying Java and JavaScript are related.

Which they are. https://wiki.c2.com/?AlgolFamily

In the way I’m related to a catfish. Knowing Java is no more helpful in writing JS as it is knowing Python.

If you mix up JS and Java you will be seen as ignorant.

Technically yes, but I would argue that words “Java” and “JavaScript” have as much to do with one another as “car” and “carpet.” I think most of us have run into a clueless recruiter that assumes the languages are interchangeable or even appropriate for the same applications.

Today I learned. This makes a lot more sense to me now knowing it isn't an emotional categorization.

> People simply get bored with how their apps and websites look after six to seven years. They need a change.

Is there any research that supports this claim? If I use an app for 6 years, why would I suddenly need a change?

I'm still ocassionally using a 10 y/o version of Photoshop. In fact, I'm very happy that it does not change. I wouldn't want to spend time on re-learning the UI. The same is true for many apps that I use.

Please don't overdo re-designs just for the sake of it.

> why would I suddenly need a change?

Because your designers need a reason to still exist, and redesigning an entire application is what that reason becomes.

Just like fashion... I wonder why we don't all wear the same style as 100 years ago, no? /s

You're apparently sarcastic, but fashion really does look like nonsense to me. I'm not sure what point you're making.

Which parts are nonsense?

The part where things are changed for no good reason.

This reminded me of that famous scene from The Devil Wears Prada: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja2fgquYTCg

I can understand that it is basically impossible to live separate from that sort of industry but that doesn't make it not nonsense. It's a very good scene (and a nice movie), but it doesn't change the fact that "fashion" is a moving target that exists for it's own sake. It's a signaling pathway that sprouted an enormous industry on it's back.

That human beings, or a portion of them, like to change their external look often enough. Maybe not in every society on Earth, but surely in many of them.

I would unironically wear Taisho-era male fashion everyday if I could. Perhaps when I have my own company....

It's more that it's just like programmers who feel technical debt forces them to overhaul entire projects.

The difference is that software projects are always hot garbage that barely works. So long as end user functionality doesn't change this is at worst benign.

UI changes on the other hand are always detrimental to users who have spent the time learning how to use the software.

If this was true, why don't product managers just hand design tasks over to Fiverr or Upwork? Surely everyone would be happy if you only paid for design when you needed it.

Because contractor work is categorically worse than salaried work, outside of very high pay grades. Bear in mind my prejudice is entirely based on my professional experience. Perhaps a magical land exists where this is not the case, but it's not the one I live in.

Designers don't want their product to look dated. Once there's enough evidence that a new trend is taking over, they feel an urge to redesign. Like programmers feel a project need a an overhaul, even though the end user thinks everything is okay.

More like: Designers won't have jobs if web sites never need to be changed. So they create work for themselves by inventing the necessity of a redesign.

Designers mostly don't initiate these kinds of things. Some Jony Ive-like rockstar designer is fairly rare.

If you want the source of most redesign initiatives, look at the middle management and executive levels. At the end of the day, if they want a redesign and a designer says "no" they'll just be replaced.

Seconded. It's generally management and junior talent who see things in that way.

While designers are to blame for a lot of awful things and same for developers, you are absolutely correct.

For most of the companies, it’s somewhere from middle management to the top that someone sees a “cool” website late at night and the next morning says “I think it’s time for a much needed re-design”

> Like programmers feel a project need a an overhaul, even though the end user thinks everything is okay.

A decent design doesn't need an overhaul to extend the functionality of a program or even to keep the program being able to run on modern operating systems, whereas the code foundation absolutely needs regular maintenance - external dependencies need to be upgraded, platforms change their APIs all the time (cough Windows), and after a number of extensions it might make sense to refactor code.

The problem is as usual career/KPI related - there is no glory in maintenance or prevention. A new design will be seen, reviewed and advertised, which if done well is good for the careers of the people involved. With the backend code, unless the developers have extremely good managers and corporate culture allows valuing of maintenance, no one cares even about a complete rewrite - maybe only when it saves actual money e.g. in hosting because money is the only thing MBAs can understand.

However the article claims the users require change. Designers are not users, although oh so often they (and developers or...) claim to represent user wishes. And often as you said users are unhappy with the redesign but who's closer to the decision makers?

Existing users are unhappy, because they have habits. New users might consider a competitor with a "fresher" design.

I see this with buttons that have shadows/not flat. It makes me think that site is old.

> People simply get bored with how their apps and websites look after six to seven years. They need a change.

I would argue that the quote generalizes to all people, just as you are generalizing your sentiment to all people.

I have a lot of 15 year old clothes in my wardrobe, I know many friends who feel the urge of buying a new outfit every few months. I am not passing judgement we are just not similar in our desire for novelty.

I value function others value form. Form valuing people will likely enjoy app redesigns, function valuing people will likely value knowing where everything is in an app rather than re-training on new designs.

Most importantly I would speculate that form valuing people are way more likely to spend money on apps and services, so these services will likely do better in catering to form over function.

Thanks for the helpful explanation!

I don't think this is true (that people get bored and need change). People get used to the way the website looks and no longer pay attention, plus they know exactly how everything works so a change is indeed disruptive (we've all been there, moaning that they've changed the way it worked!)

BUT, this is a relative thing. New shiny apps and websites will appear and suddenly yours looks dated and crp and so you become under pressure to update it.

You nailed it, though: "Please don't overdo re-designs just for the sake of it.*"

Agreed, I'd love to see some data on that claim, and for it to be in context with the friction a new design has against an existing userbase when a design change occurs. I get that as time goes on, functionality, usecases, userbases, developers, frameworks, etc all evolve over time, and it's wise to make changes to keep up with those shifts in paradigms (rise of mobile use vs desktop in the 2010's for example).

Never once heard: "Man, I sure wish this thing that I've gotten used to and enjoy using for the passed 10 years would suddenly reshuffle everything so I have to relearn where everything is just so it keeps up with whatever the new trend is". To be frank, sounds more like someone in search of some job security.

Changes are necessary over time yes, but without some studies backing it up, I can't fathom that change for the sake of staying "fresh" belongs anywhere in software design and development. As an imperative from marketing/management to attract a new userbase, sure, but that's not a Design or Dev motive. If there's an opportunity to unify the standard of design or consolidating/eliminating technical debt while undergoing a significant overhaul, sure, understandable. But "It seems a little stale, we should change it"? From a User's perspective? Please don't.

I think at least some significant portion of the constant redesign push is caused by UI/UX managers and employees justifying their continued paychecks. If you are a software company with only a few major apps then at some point not redesigning the app on a regular basis would call for a departmental reorg.

>Is there any research that supports this claim? If I use an app for 6 years, why would I suddenly need a change?

obviously designers get bored with designs and want to change them, so I would guess that other people who use the apps that did not design the apps might also get tired with it, probably there are people out there who are not designers but have a heightened design sense and they get bored whereas people who have just average design sense don't care.

Maybe you're happy with your 10 y/o Photoshop specifically because it's a change from all the other modern apps and OSes and websites. I feel people want change more than newness, and that's why 80's music and 90's clothes make a come back: it's different. Same with 10y/o software

It might look like a change now, but 10 years ago it wasn't a change. Nor 9 years ago, nor 8, 7, 6, last year. It just kept on working as it was, using the same habits and reflexes for the same user productivity.

I'm still annoyed at Facebook and Slack changing their designs. YouTube and Google have gone well with the times though.

Maybe there are 2 faces to this: current users and acquiring new users.

First one has been discussed in other comments: current users do not want to relearn the UI of the software. And I second that.

Second one: new users may turn away quick when seeing an old UI when trying an app or web site for a first time. So moving the UI from old to new, from time to time, may be a way for an app / website to just survive, otherwise the user base may be eroding.

Thoughts?

> People simply get bored with how their apps and websites look after six to seven years. They need a change.

Imagine if *nix-utils (ls, grep etc) used this method, every few years the switches/options changed !

Keeps you fresh, on your toes! Relaxing means you're not maximally productive!

If a site or app has a dated design, I usually discount it. I assume that it is going to be outdated in functionality as well. And that it will have a myriad of unsolved bugs, none of which is ever going to be fixed. New bugs have one advantage over old bugs: they have a better chance of somebody caring enough to fix it.

Ignoring the fallacy that dated design equals outdated functionality...

I'd assume the opposite in regards to bugs: My assumption would be that older software has fewer bugs since, the longer the software is used, the more likely it is for bugs to be discovered.

For bugs to be fixed, changes have to be made. If software is unchanged, by definition it will have the original bugs.

It's not always clear if software is actually changed. A changelog is useful in that regard, but you won't get that everywhere. Dated looks is a heuristic for: was build long ago, has had no changes since.

Heuristics aren't proofs of course, but you so rarely get proofs in real life anyway.

I'm still using Lynx, and several services with 0 design changes. Heck, I'm using HN.

The correct assertion would be: as time passes, the probability developes wanting to change UI to get bonuses increases monotonically.

The correct assertion would be: each year the probability developers wanting to change UI to get bonuses increases monotonically.

HN has had the same design for 15 years now.

Yeah, I took that to mean designers get bored with apps and websites after six to seven years.

So glad to see low-contrast, energy-consuming drop-shadows go away though. Is translucency gone now too so I can get my battery cycles back?

I don’t know about apps, but websites are marketing and in marketing you need to stand out. Hence the ever changing trends in design.

I've worked in graphic design and marketing on and off for like 15 years.

Do designs TYPICALLY change every 5 ish years. Yes.

Is it because of a good reason, I claim no.

While designs in companies do evolve and can be significantly different, you should still be able to tell the origin. What normally happens the creative/marketing director moves on to a new company and is replaced. The new blood has a self imposed outlook that they need to change all the things significantly to prove their vision exists. You saw this with Avis and their incredibly successful, "we are the 2nd place car rental agency, so we work harder to get your business." Except a new marketing team then got brought on due to exec politics/shuffling. Obviously the new firm cant do what the old one did because they have to prove themselves... and they dropped the ball and things went to shit.

Company restructuring, politics and egos have more to do with design changes than the unicorn world of design trends.

This neobrute idea is just a lazier version of the 90s aesthetic. Like, a basic bitch reimagining with no personality. I bet designers who like this trend are vegan and like watching The Office on repeat because, "OMG, like, the office is my favorite show ev-vaaaaaa." My 2 cents.

I work on internal UI libraries that we use in our products. We updated our designs maybe 4-ish years ago and we're already getting feedback from customers that our designs look dated.

> Is there any research that supports this claim?

Most people will redecorate their house, I don't think this claim requires research to support it. Why do people redecorate their house? Why do they suddenly decide they need a change?

Generally it's understood that people just get bored of looking at the same thing all day every day and that changing up the colours or style might make an old thing new.

Updating a sites style doesn't have to mean moving the ui to make it awkward to use, for example I have the latest version of Photoshop and I use the dark style because I like it over the old school grey I have used since the 90's but all the tools are still in the same place its the same software the only thing thats changed is the style.

> 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 design.

"Brutalism" doesn't come from "brutal" but from "brut", meaning raw or unaltered. It also had goals and values beyond being bored with the status quo, in that it was a close offshoot of modernism concerned with authenticity.

Although it's true that the name wasn't very good and it's now mostly understood to refer to the massive angular concrete structures we know and love.

Agreed. The "brutalism" in web design takes only the superficial look but forgets about the philosophy of nakedness and honesty.

How would that translate to the Web? IMO by blurring the distinction between the rendered page and the page source. Nothing to hide!

I went ahead and did just that on my own blog: https://dcz_self.gitlab.io/posts/brutalism/

Yeah. Sounds like true web brutalism would mean little to no styling. Just plain Times New Roman everywhere. Black text on grey or white, blue/purple links, etc. Apart from the font (which would probably be going a bit too far for many people), your blog is an excellent example.

I rather like that layout, no js and the page navigation passes the 'readable on an ancient blackberry classic Web browser' test. Well done.

> "Brutalism" doesn't come from "brutal" but from "brut", meaning raw or unaltered.

...and when something has that quality, you say that it's brutal.

Not according to the dictionary.

    brutal, adjective
    savagely violent: a brutal murder.
    • unpleasant or harsh
    • direct and without attempting to disguise unpleasantness

If you only look at one meaning of the word and you feel like being brutally pedantic.

"Brutal" comes via the French brutal from latin brutus (brute). The "brut" in French "béton brut" which is the expression from which "brutalist" comes from, has the same root, but in that French expression "brut" has more the meaning of "raw" rather than "savagely violent".

We see "brutal" in that sense in English too, e.g. "brutal honesty" which is not meant to imply that the honesty is savagely violent, but that it's raw and unadorned.

A dictionary that doesn't capture every nuance, who'd have thunk it?

From what I can tell, the definition of 'brut' is fairly close to brutal, but more in the sense of brutal honesty, rather than brutal violence.

Adjective

gross: brut, grossier, flagrant, choquant, fruste, bouffi

crude: brut, vulgaire, grossier, cru, simple, sec

raw: brut, cru, pur, écru, âpre, novice

unrefined: non raffiné, brut

dry: sec, aride, séché, brut, tari, caustique

rude: grossier, rude, impoli, mal élevé, brut, brusque

Noun

crude: brut

plug-ugly: dur, brut

https://translate.google.com/?sl=fr&tl=en&text=brut&op=trans...

Thank you. That paragraph annoyed me too, after I looked for what possible justification the article could come up with for talking about brutalism in web dev context.

To find they do not appear to understand the label they're talking about was no big surprise.

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

> "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 therefore isn't driven by the same high level of justification.

I strongly suspect then, there are two reasons for these design changes we see every couple of years in software:

The first is easy, and most of us probably already agree; designers gotta design. They have to justify their salary _somehow_.

The second is more philosophical. The west — and especially the U.S.A. — looks to alleviate existential crisis with distractions. Shiny new toys keeps us from having to face uncomfortable truths about the nature of reality (if you're not religious).

> 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?

Curiously enough both industries you use in your example (Auto, Fashion) have permanent designers in their payroll which again touches on GP's points.

I don't have to learn how to use scissors or paperclips everytime, I use somebody else's stationery. 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.

Do you leave your house? It’s much more difficult to find everyday objects that do not succumb to constant design changes. Bandages, razors, beverages, literally almost any box of foodstuff…

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 with paper clips or binder clips? Maybe a staple. How about one of those new air staplers?

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 fundamentally different from a regular stapler in how it binds things.

Storing this comment on a server is several leap steps forward from archiving a printed document and binding it to other comments in this thread. :)

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

The only thing that changes my jeans is wear and tear. My car pretty much stays the same unless someone takes a swipe at it.

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.

> The first is easy, and most of us probably already agree; designers gotta design. They have to justify their salary _somehow_.

Designers are typically just _workers_, if it's their own thing, then sure they might want to use that as a canvas to explore things. But generally they produce things and solve problems and don't create them.

In my experience and opinion, products are redesigned because:

- Users who get bored quickly and have superficial concerns are very loud. They want more stuff and different stuff all the time, and they make sure you know it. They don't care about orthogonal, minimal features that work nicely together, nor about stability.

- Marketing people are very good at selling things, internally and externally. Sometimes this is data driven, but it's generally a very hard and fuzzy thing to interpret. They are very good at hitting the right nerves.

- Decision makers, executives are good at inventing work for others, convincing people to follow and expanding their influence. They need to think in the abstract and are often detached from workers and users so they miss important details.

Users who are vocal and complain, cause 95%(out of my ass number) of the users who silently like the software they way it is to suffer.

I appreciate "neobrutalism" is really a very different movement to architectural brutalism, but I'm not sure how the first examples the author provides [1] can really be compared to the original brutalist movement at all. Sure, they use heavy contrast & minimal colour, but to my understanding at least, the most important aspects of brutalism were its focus on exposing the raw materials with which buildings were constructed, its geometry, and its overall minimalism.

To me, examples like [2], [3], [4], [5], [6] would be the closest the modern web can really get to "brutalism", but for some reason I can't imagine design blogs will be fawning over them.

1: https://img2.storyblok.com/860x0/filters:format(webp)/f/1172...

2: https://secretgeek.github.io/html_wysiwyg/html.html

3: https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

4: http://txti.es/

5: https://news.ycombinator.com/news

6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Agreed. This article misunderstands brutalism.

In the web's case, what are our raw materials? System fonts, default user-agent stylesheets, #000000 and #ffffff, perhaps?

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.

Brutalism has earned a bad reputation, so this term is at best backhanded praise if not an insult.

I personally much prefer a realistic 3-dimensional "skeuomorphic" design to flat-looking stuff. Highly technical imitation of reality is quite pleasing on the eyes. It also looks more serious, while the flat stuff often looks like a cartoon for nursery children.

I'd rather say brutalism has a divisive reputation.

Yeah, this seems to have more in common with Memphis design than brutalism.

https://cari.institute/aesthetics/memphis-milano

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.

https://brutalistwebsites.com/ started in 2016; it has been a while. I would even say that proper web brutalism is not a thing anymore. It never become mainstream for real, because it was too bold.

I think a much better definition for the style described in the article is "Corporate Memphis" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis - that is also a 10-year-long trend of colorful corporate soullessness.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/corporate-memphis-design-tec...

Gumroad's design is an utter monstrosity that intentionally pulls attention away from the products people are selling to the chrome of the marketplace. It's the Gumroad designers saying look at us we're special while giving a big fuck you to their customers who now have to fight for attention with the UI of the web store they're selling on. There's also nothing brutalist about this style - it's a lift from the zine inspired style that was popular in late 90s design magazines. Harrumph!

I agree that the Gumroad design is inspired by '90s entertainment magazines, esp those focused on radio and pop music. I have a sister who had a giant collection of them.

But we disagree on the Gumroad design. I'm a seller on it and while I don't know what the old interface looks like, I have no issue managing orders. Visually it's more than clear, and it stands out as a platform for indie makers. I know enterprise UI all too well, and I was pleasantly surprised that that Gumroad doesn't follow that "Hey we're a SaaS valued at $10bn" design blandscape.

The nomenclature is just wild... So concrete monoliths in architecture translate to high-contrast, colorful, fluffy graphic design?

I actually like the examples he has shown, looks a bit retro and futuristic at the same time.

Reminds me of 90s pop music magazines, just less cluttered https://archive.ph/NrIHS

(that cover was actually 2003!)

Shows you how persistent the style was :)). Do a google image search for "90s pop music magazine", for better decade dated covers.

> The nomenclature is just wild...

I totally agree. The described style has nothing to do with béton brut. Rather the opposite.

Indeed, wrong name. There is a "web brutalism", but it's not what he is describing.

I've heard this design trend being called 'maximalism' as opposed to the minimalism we've been using for the last decade

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 contrasting "ugly" css gradients etc.

example: https://www.art.yale.edu

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.

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 towards "trending UI paradigms" like "flat" or "brut" which frankly I've always found rather unnecessary on any website that requires you to interact with it.

The sites I listed above are all ones I enjoy using because there's no BS in my way, it's just efficient and quiet.

Well, I don't use craigslist — but if I needed to buy a VHS player, or wanted to find a cash-in-hand gig performing in an adult film, it would be my first port of call.*

Personal portfolio? Sure, design the shit out of it. Random blog or publication? Yeah go for it as long as the content is clear and consumable.

Forum? Shop/e-commerce? CMS/CRUD? Actual web app? Data tools? Anything that actually has to be used? Make it plain and bland, but make it work and work fast.

* Do not do this.

I'm going to have to say that I'm generally, but only _partially_ in agreement with your list of examples. When talking about "best designs", I would definitely (but respectfully) disagree with the inclusion of StackOverflow, and GitHub. Specifically:

StackOverflow

     Issues: mind-boggling bad layout (poor visual hierarchy, no clear organizing principle); inconsistent typography; too many fonts; weak affordances for useful functionality (filtering/sorting replies); hard to tell obsolete or ancient replies from newer ones

GitHub

     Issues: quasi-random screen layout; hard-to-discover functionality; mystery-meat navigation; low-level behavior/affordance inconsistencies.  (Editorial aside: this looks like the side-effect--or result(!), of a slavish application of an agile feature development model to the UI design of an application.)

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

Is it tho?

The article cites only two examples: Figma and Gumroad. While Figma obviously has the potential to influence lots of designs by being a design tool, it also seems to match the style much less directly than Gumroad. And while Gumroad is apparently a great example, two off-mainstream sites are hardly enough to base such an extremely broad claim on.

Plus this style is not really new. It seems more like a rehash of a lot of elements of a style that came and went roughly a decade ago although at the time taking more inspiration from pop art and golden age comic strips (with trapezoids and bold angles) than the more toned down examples the article shows. There's no reason to assume "neobrutalism" will be more influential than "neo pop art" was at the time.

If anything, trends seem to be largely defined by boilerplate toolkits (twitter bootstrap at its time, material now) and OSes (especially iOS but Windows modern UI also had some influence for a while).

It looks like a tentative to make it a trend. I’ve never seen a website that looked like what they describe. I’m quite sure there are many of them, but compared to something like the bootstrap look, or the flat design, it doesn’t seem to have any reach at the moment.

Yeah, it looks to me like another source that tries to make some style a thing. Like the neumorphism which seemed to be most popular on sites with mock-up designs rather than in actual implementations. I've yet to see either that or neobrutalism in the wild.

I was also surprised to see "glassmorphism" dropped without further elaboration like that. While neumorphism was certainly popular on mock-up designs (i.e. something designers enjoyed toying with for a while), "glassmorphism" just looks like acrylic taken to the extreme and acrylic is everywhere -- except it's used as a design element rather than as the foundation of an entire style.

I guess the site is biased as saying something is a trend means you can make more money off teaching designers to emulate it.

I love brutalism but please avoid redesigning your app or website. UI changes should be treated the same as API changes. Not something to do willy-nilly.

I have never in my whole live liked any change in design. (Blender might be an exception but that is cause they actually care about the workflow of existing professional users while nearly all other software is optimized for gaining new users)

It is much more expensive to gain new customers than to keep existing customers. Don't be a prick to existing ones just to chase some fashion. Sadly winning new customers is what most businesses optimize on.

> People simply get bored with how their apps and websites look after six to seven years. They need a change.

I designed my website to be clear, ad-free and hopefully visitors can focus on the content rather than animation and eye-candy. I modelled this on The Book: usually black text on white paper, with the page number and the occasional curlicue as decoration. I don't hear many complaints from people who read books about the text being "too black" so that's the way I made it. Brutalism is good.

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.

I don't really see much of this as brutalism. Fully opaque drop shadows just don't make any sense; a brutalist design wouldn't have drop shadows.

For me, the ideal UI brutalism would be black-and-white Macintosh System 6. For web brutalism, I'd generally consider "as little styling as possible; keep close to browser defaults with the changes you need for usability and readability".

This is very confined to the creative industry or some quirky websites, and I think it will remain so (it's been around for years already).

You can claim that new design trends take over the web when they get adopted by major consumor-facing websites. Like wide grotesk fonts that made it to Dropbox and that we see everywhere these days. But I bet it'll take a long time for my gmail to look like gumroad.

Here I was expecting pages that look like a plain text file but are in fact a single png.

The article gives several examples of these "brutalist" design elements, many of them basically bolder, thicker boundaries. I'm tempted to say that this new trend isn't coming from young upstart designers, but from aging ones who's once young eyes, once so appreciative of the subtle minimalism of design post 2008 or so, are not so young any longer, and long for high contrast clarity. I don't know that of course. But a lot of web design just makes my eyes tired. And don't get me started on dark mode design.

I think Brutalism had some futuristic views behind it. At least people who built those monstrous concrete structures were envisioning a future world and rejecting the past specially for architecture found in the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia.

I personally dislike it, but it had substance.

On the other hand what the post suggest is just souless corporate memphis - which personally I think it should go away. There is nothing Brutalist there and they should stop trying to force this comparison.

Random note: people are saying 'neobrutalism', but it seems to be spelled 'neubrutalism' (o » u) for whatever reason.

The German form of the new/neo- prefix. Rhymes with "coy".

Please, no. I mean, I'm ok some websites go this way, but overal, I preffer the cleanness of the flat style for most of the services.

Flat is nice but a bit boring and every website looks the same. Designers should start using some textures, shadows and gradients a bit more to add depth.

I kinda miss skeuomorphism, one of my first websites was a blackboard with a chalk font I made for my high school in 2009.

Can't there be a middle ground? I have a real hard time with the flat low-contrast design that's everywhere.

The low contrast material design makes it incredibly difficult to navigate, you constantly have to guess what is a button and what is not.

I think something like Windows 95 is peak interface design. Sounds facetious but think about it: Controls are clearly distinguished from content with not only colors but bevels. Buttons often have both icons and text so you don't have to guess what the button does. Overall it leverages real world spatial metaphors extremely effectively to produce an interface that is very intuitive. You never have to ask yourself whether a button is a dialogue or an input field because they look visually distinct.

Sure, anything can be possible. But the reality is when some trend is promoted, lots of services change their functional design system for a new one that really don't fit at all.

For example Typeform, ruined completely because of this. Dropbox, completely ruined to please their 50 design team. iOS 7, completely ruined with a silly flat style who was perfectly addressed in Android with Material Design. Same with Windows, they wanted to go translucent because Mac OS X did it properly. They made the worst one.

Every single trend like this must be serioulsy explored, and implemented once that exploration is well poured. But on final products, just to satisfy that feeling of freshness or innovation, nah, better not do that.

Windows 95 is so good because Microsoft put significant effort into making it that way. The design process was backed by usability studies featuring users of all skill levels. It was designed to be approachable by new users (new not only to Windows, but to computers in general), without hindering more advanced users.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/238386.238611

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330899

I believe that the limitations of common consumer hardware of the time also helped. Designing around 640x480x4 basically forces designers to focus on function over form. Whereas today, one could get so lost in trying to make an interface beautiful, that they forget it's ultimately a tool.

Yes, 95 was a remarkable achievement. Both Mac OS 9 and 95 were top of the UX back then. But after that, Apple made OS X, which introduced a new paradigm, look, etc. Windows just crashed with rare translucid UI implementation, then, on the flat design introduction they did Metro, another failure because the need to be on the same train

I've hated flat.. It lacks the intuitiveness of what can be pressed and what can't. And it looks unsophisticated in my opinion.. I always liked the skeuomorphism unless it was totally overdone liked the iOS notepad app or its game center.

Yes, flat can be bad if not done properly. But the bad on flat is x1000 better than any other style applied mediocrely.

I don't know much about design, but all the colorful examples that were shown look more like 80s Memphis Group to me.

I agree he is describing a style that is close to "corporate Memphis"; but not to the true Memphis - that was (and still is) quite nonconformist.

"Corporate Memphis" is a style that take away anything courageous from Memphis, and leave just a grey expanse of colors.

Do not forget the Toilet Principle, which applies to majority of software UI: Your user wants to be done with your thing ASAP, get what their came for and leave. Any visual style is a bonus, if it doesnt get in the way. I guess it applies to majority of buildings and other things too.

Good article with some interesting conceptual theory and visual examples!

I'm a Gumroad user and I do like their admin panel because it follows this kind of style. I'd personally call it "pop-art inspired" rather than giving it a label however. I'm sure I saw a similarly detailed article from another site talking about "glassmorphism", and that never really took off.

There's a page builder that's built with this kind of neo-Geocities aesthetic that's pretty fun:

https://build.mmm.page/

(prior HN discussion about mmm.page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27128424#27131476

It's amazing how most people here don't understand the concept of trends. Trends affect everyone subconsciously. And they apply to everything, but especially easily superficial things.

No one is immune to them. They are the driving force behind the design languages changes that periodically update the web. It's not much different from how interior design and clothing change over time.

It's funny because most people are intimately in tune with the fashion of a thousand different things, from shirts to web page buttons to the politics of their social group, but somehow almost completely unaware of these things consciously.

It's because they don't have a strong concept of metacognition or understanding of how belief structures work.

Modern software development is now caught in an influx of fresh developers/designers, which leads to "best practices" and libraries appealing to less experienced and less competent workers, which in turn change the processes everyone uses.

In design that means designers converging on some simple to reproduce esthetic like this, which becomes familiar to users, and then ironically becomes popular because of its familiarity. That is, until a few years pass, and a new fad has to surface.

I'm predicting Art-Deco in web design within 10 years at this pace.

Looks more like wireframism to me - for example https://balsamiq.com/wireframes/

My favorite application of this design is Shopify's bio link product https://linkpop.com/

Luckily, I don't see this “taking over the web” at all. This looks like design created by people who aren't good at design.

Peak HN comment.

Yes, Figma designers aren’t good at design. Thousands of people would disagree with you.

Sorry for being populist. Design is created for a purpose. If your goal is to ”take over the web”, a design that appeals only to a small minority means your design failed.

Also, Figma's website looks pretty normal. It's barely registering in the scale of “neobrutalim”, whatever the hell that's even supposed to mean for a digital media.

Except there’s not much “neubrutalism” in Figma’s design. Some borders are thicker than usual, that’s about the extent of it; it’s otherwise quite similar to every other landing page. (Yes, it uses a lot of soft shadow.) Looks like OP tried really hard to find examples for something that’s allegedly taking over the web.

Check this one out: https://config.figma.com/events/figma-config-2022/home

When flat design was first becoming a thing, I thought the idea was what is now seemingly "neobrutalism". I mean the clue should be in the name, flat design should be flat, which neobrutalism seems to be much more so than what flat design ended up being. Now I don't know whats what when it comes to design.

Either way, it looks nice enough to me

What happened to claymorphism, then? Was all the rage just 3 months ago (at least in the author's imagination).

You made me search for it. I've never seen a site with that design.

One website which seems to be somewhat inbetween "bad design" and neobrutalism is the dutch retailer kruidvat: https://www.kruidvat.nl/

Interesting site, this might be the first example of neo/brutalism that I like a little. It feels somehow fresh and clean like an interactive piece of glossy magazine paper. Somewhere else somebody posted this site which I would qualify as typical brutalism which is terrible from pretty much all viewpoints: https://secretgeek.github.io/html_wysiwyg/html.html

Yes i was suprised also by the design of the kruidvat website, it refreshing. Kruidvat also is known for cheap stuff so i think part of the “cheapness” of the design is well intentional.

Brutalism is about exposing the innards of a building. It is nothing about chaos (quite the contrary). The best webdesign analogy of brutalism would be a literate programming interface like a Jupyter Notebook.

Yes, this style is much more like zines and 70s-90s posters for indie band performances.

Brutalism was never about brashness or intentional amateurism. "Neo-DIY" or "New DIY" would be a better name.

At one point I wanted to be a UX designer. I'm glad I didn't go that route. If only the focus was on research-backed timeless designs instead of chasing the latest trends.

I wonder how big of an impact regular architecture, or fashion even, had on the design of web pages of the past and how big of an impact they will have in the future.

The HN title does not exactly match the article title, which is:

"Neubrutalism is taking over the web"

(I have no idea about design so not sure if it's actually significant.)

3 months ago, claymorphism was taking over the web, and before that, neumorphism and glassmorphism and what have you. All this "taking over" and nomenclature was an invention of a single person, so it looks like a wannabe fashion designer wanting to make a big name for himself and set trends.

Interesting page for brutalism lovers

> https://www.sosbrutalism.org

As a designer, it's embarrassing that this is the level of article that gets traction these days in our industry.

Maybe we can inspire the next trend by referencing casino carpets, and further optimise down this road. /s

Domain name checks out, at least.

Every browser have a brutalist mode. Just press CTRL+u to see the source code.

Oh I thought Neobrutalism was about the internet trend of cheering about weapons and mutilated Russian soldiers. No matter how much we love for Ukrainians to be free, support of war is a very thin line.

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