I enjoy the look of these, but personally I wouldn't have thought to describe them as neobrutalist, so I'm thinking I don't know what it is.
How is brutalism defined in this context? When I think web brutalism I think Craigslist style sites and reduction of superfluous design elements.
Yeah, I can't stand these influencer-wannabe web-devs misusing terms.
béton brut means "raw concrete" in French, and in architecture that's what brutalism is. I'd say only sites that look like they use the default style of HTML with no CSS on Netscape 1.x could be called "brutalist"...
E.g. https://stallman.org
IMO the design is more "Windows 3.1 Hot Dog Stand Theme" https://blog.codinghorror.com/a-tribute-to-the-windows-31-ho... combined with MS WordArt...
> I'd say only sites that look like they use the default style of HTML with no CSS on Netscape 1.x could be called "brutalist"
I agree, but maybe just not on the Netscape 1.x part. Brutalism in all of it's forms has never been about traditionalism. Even if concrete wasn't a new matieral in the 50s, you can't say something like Église Notre-Dame du Haut [0] is following any sort of traditional church architecture.
Brutalism on the web to me would focus more on honesty. An honest website shows you the processes your browser is undertaking, and how that results in rendering it's purpose. Images should load in progressively, any layout tables/divs/scaffolding shouldn't be invisible, a link/button/headings should behave/look how they "natively" do in whatever browser you happen to be using (not specifically netscape 1.x). If you're writing a cookie to the current session, I want to see that state reflected on the page. If I see a process happening I don't like, I should be able to stop it.
That doesn't have to look old or be unstyled. But there's certainly a way that letting hypertext just sort of "exist" makes a website more honest. All things considered right now, I'd say honesty is a pretty non-traditional adjective for the web haha.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notre-Dame_du_Haut
I instantly thought of Nielsen's personal homepage - http://useit.com - which has moved on to a little softer and corporate design - but still linger in the Internet Archive:
1996:
https://web.archive.org/web/19961227172043/http://www.useit....
2001:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010711195207/http://www.useit....
Completely forgetting that design in of itself is completely subjective and brutalism within a digital space is conveyed in an entirely different way to that of architecture.
Constantly reminded why I gladly left the design space, can't stand people who think design should be siloed or interpreted this way.
FWIW, from the OP website:
> Neobrutalism is a mix of regular brutalism in web design and more modern typography, illustration, and animation standards. Neobrutalism refuses the usual components of UX-UI design and embraces uncomfortable design elements, and it is more fearless to use distinctive color palettes.
nothing about this is neobrutalist by their own standards. There is nothing “uncomfortable” about these standard round flat shapes, and unvibrant 3/4 saturated tones, they aren’t distinct, its called Alegria[1], calling it neobrutalism is a corruption of the meaning of brutalism and comes off as distinctly uncultured.
neobrutalism should have sharp edges, very vibrant saturated colors, and virtually none of these flowery spiral shapes. (neo)brutalism is forcing a square peg in a round hole with a hammer, and leaving it like that on purpose, because the raw swedge is the aethetic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis
I don’t necessarily think it’s doing something wildly new and different, but I also don’t see how this style looks anything like what’s in that Wikipedia article.
Right, hence why it's called "Neo-brutalist" and not "brutalist". It's not just plain un-styled html.
Neo just means new. It's not an out-of-jail card if it is completely unrelated to the old/real thing.
Neo doesn't mean it can just be a completely different thing, it means its a modern take on the same thing from before but slightly evolved. Neo-Classicism still looks like Classicism. Neo Nazis are still Nazis.
If I create something called Neo-Cuisine, you'd expect the result to be edible. If I see something calling itself "Neo-Brutalist Architecture", I'd expect it to look like Brutalism, or have some hallmark of the style. e.g. raw, but a different material new to the time period).
As far as web design, there's nothing "raw" about 100s of dependencies and animated charts and rounded rects and opinionated fonts and the rest of the this pastiche in "64 components, charts and star shapes for React and Tailwind v4. Built on shadcn/ui and Base UI." This is just Corporate Memphis + dialog aesthetics[0]
[0]: https://invisible-island.net/dialog/
It's a visual style, yet all your criticisms are about under-the-hood technicalities. The style I use for my personal projects (https://frost-e.com/design-system/) is a single css file, but looks similar. Nothing is stopping you from applying this visual style to plain HTML components.
The under-the-hood technicalities are part of it, but I didn't call it Corporate Memphis for nothing. What hallmarks of the Brutalist style do you think this exhibits, in-so-far as an architectural style can be applied to the web?
Yum, soft hot dog stand!
>It's a visual style, yet all your criticisms are about under-the-hood technicalities
the very point of brutalism is to turn its material 'inside out', what defines brutalism is that it makes the material and structural elements it's made of visible. It's not a 'visual style' or an aesthetic at all but an 'ethic of construction' something was brutalist if it was honest, and exposed, what a thing was made of.
If you want to apply that notion to web design It's not about 1 CSS file or 100 but whether the mechanics of CSS or HTML are still visible on the site, or if it's all buried under colors, animations, styling etc. Craigslist is a pretty good example of a brutalist website, so is this site, HN.
Brutalism is absolutely a visual style. It's an architectural style artificially designed to look drab, raw and ugly.
If you look at brutalist buildings, it becomes obvious that its looks are the results of intentional design completely removed from its underlying "structural" concerns. You don't accidentally arrive there by refusing to think about aesthetics or by just being "honest".
You can't accidentally arrive at a building, that's by definition true for all architecture, it doesn't fall out of the sky. They also didn't design it to be ugly, that's your value judgement, not a property of the architecture.
What brutalists meant when they talked about honesty or the ethic of design is that the building should reflect on the outside, its construction, its social purpose, and its function. Obviously that's a visual choice, but not an aesthetic one.
And the fact that so many people, including you reach for the description of it as 'ugly' proves that point. They weren't trying to appeal to some established notion of taste, or some aesthetic school that prioritizes the appearance of a thing over its function but the opposite.
“neowhimsical” would be a more accurate description. Definitely not “brutalist”, I’m unsure if the founders of this term ever saw anything brutalist.
There's two definitions of brutalist web design. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42027654#42028919
I think your definition is closer. I would instead look at Bell Kiosk as a good example of someone doing the digital equivalent of brutalism
I would call this bauhaus not neobrutalism.
Neobrutalism has been around long enough as a web style (ca. 2021?) that the name has already stuck, but you're totally right.
It's a niche and not super-well defined, but definitely existing style, ie: https://neubrutalism.com/
Broadly, it's a move away from flat, low contrast Material-type UIs and also away from the 'gradients and curves' AI-era designs and back into something that's more like the early web.
Interesting. I had thought my own web site (https://bradlyfeeley.com) was neo-brutalist, so I was taken back by how different this design was from my own.
I know we're just talking about silly word definitions and etymology here, but just from my personal understanding, your site represents what I think neobrutalism "looks like" a lot better than the previous examples which are branded as neobrutalist. This is just my perspective of course.
Edit: I just saw another person say this, and it described the style of the sample sites so much better than "neobrutalism" that I just had to add this, these samples look so much more like Bauhaus!
I am not a front end dev. But one question I always had is why px and not em? I thought em as a relative distance would be better than hard coding px?