Brutalism is the worst architectonic style. I spent quite a bit of time in brutalist buildings and they impact you negatively. Idk why anyone would want to reference that.
I’m not so sure about that. At my university (University of Texas at Dallas) we are “blessed” with a legacy of brutalist architecture [1], which I’ve been told won its fair share of architecture awards. [?] (I’ll assume that means it’s been done “right”.
As you can see, it’s been really great for our mental health :) [2]. I can appreciate this style of architecture from an intellectual level, but to be around these kinds of buildings daily is a little exhausting.
>I can appreciate this style of architecture from an intellectual level
Indeed. There are many things – not only architecture – that are interesting to look at for a bit, maybe on paper, but that I would never want to actually have around me in my life. It seems that some people do not consider this difference. Architecture is particularly troublesome, since others force it upon you. You cannot choose it like you can choose what music to engage with, for example.
Architecture is like high fashion -- what architects celebrate is not what's good for users, but what's fun in their art shows. Architecture-as-art uses human environments as their canvas instead of as their goal. Architecture award-winning is usually the opposite of what architecture users consider "done right".
Like any school of archeticture, there are good examples and bad. Largely, over time, only the good examples survive. The older the school, the higher percentage of it will be good, surviving examples.
I find the Barbican in London — which I walk through most days — to be a very uplifting building!
Partly this is because the Barbican is exceptionally well kept (much brutalist architecture is associated with slum estates, whereas the Barbican is mostly inhabited by richer people). The concrete is clean, the ponds and fountains are working, the balconies overflow with plants.
There are many exceptional examples of brutalist architecture in Paris, some well kept, some not so much:
I don’t like brutalist and I don’t like the Barbican. For me, brutalist architecture is defined by an extraordinary level of arrogance and disregard for well established design.
When I was last at the Barbican I found it very hard to navigate, and I was relieved to be told by the staff there about the many “alterations” they’ve had to make to try to make the building less confusing and alien.
Something that I think the Barbican does well, and The National Theatre (another London brutalist building) also does well, is interesting interior spaces - openess, multi-levels, "floating" staircases, interior views, visible structural elements etc. I find both of these spaces energising and interesting to be in.
Other brutalist buildings are just horid. I worked in Sampson House (just behind Tate Modern) for a couple of years which is also brutalist but the interior is dank corridors and dingy spaces. I also worked at the brutalist IBM offices next door to the National Theatre and it was also a souless space inside. They have absolutely zero-ambition and are the polar opposite of the spaces at the Barbican and National Theatre.
Ironically physical brutalism often fails because of poor usability and discomfort, while the brutalist web design manages to be faster and more accessible than whatever the conventional (baroque?) style is.
I think we all benefit from a little bit of useless ornament. Unadorned brut concrete rapidly becomes so ugly that some buildings became notorious suicide spots.
Even so, concrete is unmaintanable and unmodifiable. That's why (self-absorbed) architects love it -- it's a sculpture or "walled garden" (with emphasis on the "wall") where the prole users can't interfere with the architect's art project by making the building usable for their own needs.
I dunno... the Yale Art & Architecture building is a classic early example of brutalism, and I've never been in a space that felt more open to creativity or so honest... it was a revelation the first time I stepped inside of it. I looked forward to classes there because it felt uplifting for my soul, and deeply envied architecture students who got to use it as their workspace, its spirit was so perfect.
Of course I'm sure brutalism can be done badly too (like anything), and I haven't spent time on the inside of too many others... but there can be something profound about it -- a modern building in balance that tries to be exactly what it is, no more, no less.
The problem I think is not so much the brut as the béton. I don't find concrete to be a wonderful material, aesthetically speaking. Even when you take into account the fact that it can be formed and poured into almost any shape. But the philosophy of minimalism/honesty/unity captures some very sound principles.
I'm surprised that so many folks here (obv not everyone) have so readily accepted the word "brutalist" to apparently mean "simple, functional, and minimal", because that's definitely NOT what brutalism entails in the architectural world!
I really like a lot of brutalist architecture, but much of it is far LESS functional/useful/practical than other styles. Brutalism was an aesthetic, largely a reaction to existing forms--many of which were characterized by their utility! A lot of brutalist architects were rebelling against the bourgeois notion of a building as merely (as they saw it) "a place intended for humans to live, work, and play", and instead asserting the notion of a building as an artistic form in its own right, which often meant intentionally disregarding or downplaying the importance of the building's utility for the humans who interacted with it! Anyone who has lived or worked in a brutalist building can aver this truth: if the building served its function w/r/t humans, it was often DESPITE its artistic intentions, which prioritized almost everything else instead.
I generally agree with the principles. There's so much bloat and poor usability around that it's worth going back to basics. However, part of the pleasure of using a website is the design - put a 'brutalist' site and a 'brutalist with a design pass' infront of people and see which they prefer...
I liked how scrolling actually worked, there was minimal jank, the text was large enough, flow was predictable, and it felt fast. I know places have to keep the lights on which requires a u-turn from this but it was surely refreshing.
Love the function-first design approach -- e.g., "start with left-aligned black text on a white background, and to apply styling only to solve a specific problem."!
But I'm not sure that "Brutalist" is the best name for it, as it carries a connotation of harsh, even ugly architecture designed around the materials, which brutalizes the user, whereas this web design is all about presenting the content in the best, least distracting way for the user ("When in doubt, do what Tron does: fight for the users.").
I completely agree, I was about to write the same: that name is VERY badly chosen, it conveys the wrong idea to anybody who has not read the origin of the term, and makes it sound horribly pretentious (something I hate).
Whereas the ideas are quite sound (and common sense). I also find it weird, to say the least, that so many people seem to rediscover those ideas that have been known -and advocated- FOREVER by people with a clue (look at Jacob Nielsen for an example).
I also enjoy the irony that the writer uses a VERY BIG font for the titles (H1), that "brutalizes" (LOL) my eyes, especially the HUGE title of the article: they are MUCH too big.
Well, I owe few years that kickstarted my career at a very nice income level to it, but all 3 years as a webdev I hated with passion every request of squeezing js animation into every part of the page. God thanks web development is a thing of the past for me
Though, that dude who incessantly pushes his imaginary "design trend" to every major website is not much a "lesser evil"
It is an "ingenious" business model to raise up hype over "the new great design trend" nobody heard about, and then sell your expertise in it and your design "services" at six digits per project
JS is fine, as long as it has purpose. I think the original idea of progressive enhancement needs a renaissance: use little bits of JS to improve the lives of people who have it enabled (e.g., by autocompleting an input, filtering a large form), but add it after you've made it work without JS.
>The idea of a more interactive web is not "cancer".
I specifically refer to the design trend that spun off from the greater concept. In 9 out of 10 webdev projects, and how it is understood by "business dudes" web 2.0 is only a some kind of design trend, no more. And a kind with 20 animation scripts per page.
> It is an "ingenious" business model to raise up hype over "the new great design trend" nobody heard about, and then sell your expertise in it and your design "services" at six digits per project
That's 99% of marketing: figure out a thing that nobody really needs, figure out a way to make them think they need it, then sell it to them at a ridiculous price.
I have no idea what that section is trying to say? It isn't a feature but a requirement is the common argument. It isn't a primary feature but a result of following minimalist criteria is another..
The example that a long book of text downloads in a second seems to be saying the latter..
> It isn't a feature but a requirement is the common argument.
An argument that no one listens to, which is why the web isn't performant and is instead full of bloated junk. They are acting like performance isn't even a feature, like users don't care about it and shouldn't have it. This is wrong.
Performance should not be sold as a new feature; it should be one of the main drivers from the beginning. I remember reading the verge redesign article where they raged about the speedups compared to their previous site - and the new was still bloated.
Agreed. It’s like advertising that a car has an engine and goes faster than walking. Having an engine isn’t a feature, it’s the the essence of what makes a car, a car.
You are right, sorry. When I first read it I internalized it as meaning to say that Performance is not an extra feature that you tack on to an existing web app (like you would implement say an offline mode as part of an update) but rather something that needs to be considered from the ground up right in the design stage. But I can see how putting it this way could be confusing.
I appreciate the analogy to architecture. Specific words are useful. You can communicate more information succinctly by labeling something skeuomorphic, brutalist, material, etc.
All of this can be achieved without looking like a text file. This form of brutalism feels like a reaction to BAD design. Step into the world of good design, which does exist, and suddenly these points and much more is being addressed in UX and UI design.
>A website is not an application or a video game. It is for content, and so its design must serve that purpose.
Apparently it could also be titled "Guidelines to make the web great again" or "Guidelines for blogs in 1995" for all the relevance to modern web design.
http://www.hyperfiddle.net/, an exotic fullstack web framework, enforces brutalist design! (cofounded by me) Database effects are buttons and navigation is links, and the rest too. What do you think, HN, does it work?
"A friend gave me design advice once. He said to start with left-aligned black text on a white background, and to apply styling only to solve a specific problem. This is good advice. Embrace this, and you embrace Brutalist Web Design. Focus on your content and your visitors will enjoy you and your website. Focus on decoration or tricking your visitors into clicking ads, and your content will suffer, along with your visitors."
Please don't. Pure-white pages are painful to look at, let alone try to read -- just because our monitors can go all the way to #fff doesn't mean that's a good color to use more than once in a (rare) while.
You're saying this because black on white hurts your eyes? Because if I'm reading something, I really don't care about what the text looks like and that's what black on white is good at: distraction free reading.
I feel like this is an idea for a simple browser plugin. If the site is #000 text on a #fff background, apply a stylesheet with lower contrast.
If high contrast is painful to look at, and you can't control web designers throughout the world, but you can control your own web browser... then why are you still suffering?
Ultimately I'd prefer a slight tweak - for example eee/111 or similar but I'd still prefer fff/000 to the ridiculously low contrast foreground/background trend in recent years. Perfect example: https://peach-melpa.org/ - on my equipment and with my eye sight, that's literally unreadable.
If it's really painful, make sure you lower your monitor's brightness. Basically, the white color on the monitor should be the of same brightness as a sheet of white paper near it.
Agree. Good proportion of us suffer from glare, pure white is literally painful to read. I usually reach for a dark mode just to be more pleasant. The whole premise of BWD is sound .... Content first, add bling only to solve a UX problem.
If black-on-white is painful to look at, your monitor is too bright. Sadly, this is the case for the substantial majority of people, and so as web developers/designers/implementers we have to take it into account.
Laptops tend to have the ability to conveniently adjust brightness, but then everyone went with ambient light sensors, and because they’re really pretty terrible at getting it right, laptop and OS manufacturers opted for erring on the side of excessive brightness, and so laptop screens are normally somewhere between too bright and way too bright.
Desktop screens tend to be hard to adjust the brightness of, because the physical unit’s OSD approach to changing brightness is awful, and OS vendors haven’t hooked anything helpful into it for reasons that quite escape me. So most people still have their screens set at the default brightness level, which is way too bright for anything but direct sunlight.
I remember with fondness CRTs that had a physical brightness dial that you could turn. So much better than what we have now.
Phone screens… yeah, they’re normally too bright too for similar reasons to laptops. Again I criticise ambient light sensors.
I went to quite some length to get the screen brightnesses for my Windows laptop and the external displays I normally use even vaguely sane, involving obscure freeware from ten years ago and deep diving into Windows APIs; there are basically two different APIs for working with display brightnesses: laptops’ internal displays use one, and external displays use the other (the internal display is also available through the other, but it doesn’t actually work for changing brightness). Said other API which external monitors need is exposed absolutely nowhere in any UI at all. (Windows basically lies about being unable to adjust brightness of external displays in its Settings app.) Screen-brightness-adjusting keys don’t seem to be interceptable (no hooking onto XF86MonBrightnessUp and XF86MonBrightnessDown as I did on my previous, Arch Linux, laptop), so your only recourse for linking the external displays’ brightness would be detecting the internal monitor’s brightness changing and effecting. (Incidentally, the jump from 0% brightness to 10% brightness is consistently massive on LCDs; I worked around this on Linux by making a logarithmic scale wrapper around xbacklight, but I can’t fix that conveniently on this laptop.)
At present, I just type “b 0”, “b 40” or whatever into Command Prompt and it invokes a CLI-based external-screen-brightness-adjusting program.
In my home office, my external displays normally operate at 20–40% brightness during the day, though I’ve gone up to 70% on occasion before, and 0% brightness during the evening (and I’d prefer −20–−10%; most screens’ minimum brightness is unreasonably bright).
They may indeed have reasons, but in the substantial majority of cases they don’t, or their reasons are badly flawed, and they would do well to reduce their brightness.
I will continue to recommend that people reduce their brightness in almost all cases. That’s my job as a friendly person.
As a web developer, though, there is little scope for insisting that they’re wrong, which is why I say we have to take most people’s badly configured monitors into account.
Lot of displays I encountered use PWM when you reduce the brightness. That causes the screen to flicker if it's not on 100% (see it yourself via a slow motion cam on you phone).
Good to know. I admit I haven’t seriously used anything but a good quality monitor for the last few years, and simple research suggests PWM is only likely to cause visible artefacts on LED backlights (TFTs are slow enough that they don’t dim completely when cycling quickly), which only became popular fairly recently, so that might account for my being unfamiliar with the probelm. Certainly there are still some types of patterns or of content which when scrolling look awful on LCDs and I understand that PWM (though I didn’t know that was the specific term) can be part of the problem there. Yet for reference, in my earlier teen years and before I always found it hard to cope with CRTs at 60Hz (it rapidly produced migraines, so I used polarising sunglasses to help; 80Hz was barely OK, 90Hz was acceptable and 120Hz which I could use on one monitor was lovely).
> It’s not anyone’s job as a web designer to insist they're wrong.
But this goes both ways. I've seen developers complain about the W3C accessibility standards on contrast because it looks too severe on their retina display full-brightness Macbook.
But the relative cost of having too much contrast (it's uncomfortable to read, but still perfectly legible) and the relative ease of fixing it (turn down your laptop brightness) is very minor when compared against the many people with crappy, low-light displays that can't adjust their brightness or fix the problem of low contrast text.
Often what people mean when they say to optimize for what people have is that they'd prefer to optimize for the highest quality devices first. But for a nontrivial number of websites and demographics, those devices are the minority, and in those situations high-contrast black-on-white text will look better on a wider variety of the devices that ordinary people are using.
Is it not computing to 16px for your screen? I feel like you must have problems on 99% of websites if 16px font does not render large enough for you to read. Heck, HackerNews renders at 10.6/12px for me.
Ah, the page has a setting for displaysize. It was set to 0.5x when I ooened the link. Most pages work just fine if someone does not fiddle with stuff ;)
This site does use styling to solve one specific problem: overlong lines on wide screens.
A sensible max-width and line-height can do wonders for readability, to the point that there are "reading mode" extensions that do pretty much just that.
This site has main.max-width = 34em and line-height = 1.5 which is a good choice in my opinion.
There also seems to be some nice vertical rhythm going on with the paragraph and title spacing.
Do you have any citations for this claim? I can only find scholarly sources from the 1980s.
If it is the hardest to read, why is it used in print? What distinguishes print from electronic media that means that justification works in one place but not the other?
I would be particularly interested to read anything recent that considers legibility in print, the advent of high pixel density displays, and the impact of good justification such as that offered by microtype.
I'm slightly biased here: I believe that justification has got a bad reputation due to how badly web browsers (especially Chrome which doesn't even support hyphenation) handle it.
It is used in print to pack in the most letters into a single line, because the layout is fixed and words can be broken. It was simply economic to do so. Today we don't have that constraint and with tons of displays we can't be sure how the text will look fully justified.
Browsers are indeed bad at it, but we don't need fully justified text in the first place. For me personally, I prefer varying line lengths because I can easily keep track where the previous line was.
I was hoping for rigorous studies rather than opinions as I have plenty of those myself :)
Thank you for taking the time to respond, though. I had not heard the columns-as-line-separators argument before, but I'm not sure I buy it as most books are justified but do not use multiple columns.
> with tons of displays we can't be sure how the text will look fully justified.
This argument could be applied to ragged text, too. Are you saying that you can't be sure how it looks and therefore you can't justify it? The answer then seems to simply be "compute the layout on the client", as is done anyway.
There is none I'm aware of, but there are some quotes though :) I think we have justified text because of historic reason, it doesn't make much use on the web since it's a totally new medium.
> Are you saying that you can't be sure how it looks and therefore you can't justify it?
No, I'm saying it's unpredictable so we should avoid using it, while left aligned text is the default that works best in any circumstance.
”It is used in print to pack in the most letters into a single line”
Huh? I would think that, for every fully justified line there’s a left-justified one with the same content that is, at worst, equally wide, but typically less wide.
I think full justification traditionally is done for aesthetics, possibly with a bit of “look what we can do” added (it takes a better typesetter to set a line fully justified than it does to set a left-justified one with equal-sized spacing, even when both cases use kerning)
Justification was used because people thought equal width columns looked better. Columns of text are generally unnessary in the digital world because you can have one infinitely long column.
In Grid Systems in Graphic Design (1981) the author argued against justification because he thought having spaces of different lengths between words created a poor rhythm (I will find the exact quote tomorrow).
But most publications using justification initially didn't use columns, e.g. books.
I do think multi-column layouts are sorely underutilised on the web. Modern websites make a mockery of desktop wide-screen displays where they use about a quarter of the screen and fill the rest with adverts.
> What distinguishes print from electronic media that means that justification works in one place but not the other?
Browser are pretty bad typesetting engines. Word breaking doesn't work very well, they don't and can't do protrusion or expansion. The low resolution of displays means you microadjustments don't really work, because they at most slightly shift contrast from one anti-aliased edge to the opposing edge.
Justified text works very well if you're able to competently apply all those techniques (e.g. MS Word and similar document editors didn't do any of that for a long time).
Bad justification results in rivers, uneven spacing, broken edges etc.
You can use justified text, but if and only if you also use hyphenation. This way, you won't have varying widths of whitespace between each word. But hyphenation on the web is... not satisfying.
> Focus on your content and your visitors will enjoy you and your website. Focus on decoration
Yeah its time for that person to take a marketing class.
Despite my website having best-in-class content, it took a custom wordpress theme for people to begin taking it seriously/sharing. My conversion doubled overnight.
Surely if companies all dropped their marketing budgets to 0, they will increase the profits enormously and provide way more value to their customers! They dont understand anything!!
People tried to sell just as much back then. But they were only about 2billion so the average person didnt have to wade through a swamp of thirsty advertising 24/7. Maybe the whole thing is unsustainable, maybe we can control ourselves, maybe we are better that bacteria in a closed system that multiply untill they kill themselves
"But that's the last 2 generations did things, I can't possibly imagine any other way for life to work"
I'm not against value, I'm against the term "provide value" because (to me, and I'm probably a huge minority in HN) it is a term loaded with capitalist meanings.
We don't talk about providing value in academia, I assume they don't talk about providing value in philanthropic organizations or political movements. Whenever I hear the term it essentially means "to make money".
I appreciate that this is my personal interpretation of this though
The point is that advertising is a subset of marketing, not another name for the same thing. In addition to advertising, marketing includes building websites and providing information, research to determine market demand, and determining optimal pricing.
> Despite my website having best-in-class content...
That's quite a claim. I'm not sure which website is your's so I can't dispute it. Personally, I frequent websites with higher quality content and avoid "gotta-sell-you-something" sites.
Also, as another commentor mentioned:
> It sounds like you applied styling to improve your conversion rates
Could we somehow estimate how much electricity unnecessary design - mostly meaning unnecessary js running on pages - costs the planet? I guess it was done already...
Yes, running JS takes energy. Also, transferring this extra data over the network, running servers that process data transferred by JS (ad tracking) and running computers used by frontend developers.
Yes! I would argue this steers away from brutalism into a much more sensible, usable place. Definitely the kind of UI I advocate strongly in my book. <shameless type=“plug”> http://uxbook.io </shameless>
I don't think this is Brutalist. At best it's minimalist.
The problem is, the design here is comfortable and pleasant to read, but every example of Brutalist architecture I've seen exudes... well.. brutality. Those buildings look like they come from a dystopian future where fascist robots took over.
It's a good guide, but poor branding. To me, an actual Brutalist website would be what you see when you view a site's source - raw, unparsed HTML, left to the viewer to make sense of.
In my opinion the author's suggestions are more minimalist than brutalist. Design aesthetics currently in play at Businessweek and The Outline are more commonly categorized as "brutalist" - but categorizing any style or design trend is a subjective exercise.
Off the top of my head, these are my impressions of what "brutalist web style" means at the moment:
- Playful departure from what western web society considers "good design" in 2018
- Experimental execution of white space occasionally using zero margins, less line spacing, unusual or no grids
- Limited color palettes, black with neon splashes of color
- Text frequently overlaps images (negative margins)
- Nostalgic of early web aesthetics with frequent nods to zine print design
If you look at this backwards, brutalist web design is not a merely “back to basic” because at dawn of the web there was no CSS, neither JS and very little tools at your disposal.
HTML pages back then looked too brutal to our eyes, so we visually borrowed from what it was more aesthetically close: Print Design.
We used data tables to design layouts. We used print design tools (PhotoShop, etc) to design shapes, shadows, gradients, custom fonts, even rounded corner (Web 2.0 all-rounded trend came out when browser implemented the border-radius propriety).
Nowadays CSS let us design complex layouts without the need of graphic software. But more than that, in all these years we developed a common “web aesthetic”: Today HTML looks less brutal to our eyes than 27 years ago.
This was true even for photography: it took almost 100 years before it was seen as something else other than an “art for failed painters”.
I like the general design philosophy, but I think this website as an example is weakly executed and shows the author's poor commitment to his own philosophical ideals. Specifically, the author claims to maintain a 'Truth to materials', which is summarized on the Wikipedia page he links to as "any material should be used where it is most appropriate and its nature should not be hidden". However, he then goes on to include hidden JavaScript tracker code in the footer of his page:
$ xidel https://brutalist-web.design -s --css='script'
var _gauges = _gauges || [];
(function() {
var t = document.createElement('script');
t.type = 'text/javascript';
t.async = true;
t.id = 'gauges-tracker';
t.setAttribute('data-site-id', '5aff5aa154a1b97a229142e1');
t.setAttribute('data-track-path', 'https://track.gaug.es/track.gif');
t.src = 'https://d2fuc4clr7gvcn.cloudfront.net/track.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];
s.parentNode.insertBefore(t, s);
})();
Beyond this, the author also minifies his 'built by hand' HTML and includes a few other blobs of webpack-bundled JavaScript code. Sure, this is all not-unexpected for run-of-the-mill websites these days, I was just expecting a better example from a web-design manifesto advocating the exact opposite.
I disagree. I'll grant that if you narrowly idealize 'the visitor' to be a content-consumer who never chooses to 'view source' (let alone use a command-line user-agent to interact with a website), minifying/bundling HTML/JS doesn't affect the 'visitor experience' design.
However, hidden tracker JavaScript definitely impacts every visitor's experience, and directly betrays the 'honest and transparent interaction with a visitor' the author desires:
> a button agrees to submit the visitors information to the server. Hiding this interaction behind a hyperlink or unadorned text betrays the core nature of a website.
The JavaScript tracker hides its interaction behind the browser's JavaScript engine, which is a much greater betrayal than any poorly-styled hyperlink or button.
This page slapped me in the face... But in a good way.
I’m not much of a designer, so I wonder what the main differences between “minimalism” and “brutalism” are. To me, I’m ok with sites running analytics and an ad or two, so long as I can read all the content in one go without the page stuttering on my phone or redirecting me suddenly.
I'd say minimalism is characterized by trying to remove as much non-content as possible, while this philosophy is more about everything serving a purpose. A minimalist might want to get rid of ads because they are not content, while this kind of brutalism prescribes designing the ad in a way that doesn't detract from the content.
I generally agree that websites should be simple. Website for me means that it’s a page that shows mostly static information and there is minimal or no interaction other than reading. For that I think having simple or event brutalist design works fine.
But now, lot of “websites” are actually apps, where there are complex interactions, dynamic information, complex workflows and tools. I don’t think the same approach works anymore
I don’t think anyone who complains about the complex or visual designs of web apps, complains that same way about their native or mobile apps. Do you really want your desktop windows to be all full screen boxes on white background, every action as a blue underlined link? Do you want your programming ide look this way? Do you want that every time you change a view in your apps there is a full page reload of the content? This is where the complex designs, react, animation, data and state management comes in to make the user experience more fluid, enjoyable, understandable, and hopefully meeting the needs of the users.
There is some fair critisim that some or many websites are over designed and over engineered for various reasons. I also see that lot of the web frontend basics are now forgotten or ignored, you just create everything with JavaScript, and then spend half of the time trying fix or rebuild the functionality browsers provide with html out of the box.
Nobody complains about Google Docs being "an app". If a program like that doesn't have "normal scrolling" and a functional "back" button people will tend to forgive them.
Most sites aren't that, though, even if their devs think they are. LinkedIn and Twitter and Reddit are just plain old boring mostly-static collections of pages.
They might have a few good reasons to screw up their UI anyway, though:
- They can attract devs who want on the bandwagon,
- The "man on the street" might actually like crap like the Reddit redesign. Let's not blindly assume that our aesthetic preferences are shared by the public, even if they seem like a clear moral good to us (and especially if that moral intuition is informed by a technical background that is not widely shared.)
The counter to that is, does everything really need to be an app? Take reddit for example, it was perfectly usable and in fact worked great when it was a static page without any JS going on. The current app-like "new reddit" is by comparison less usable and noticeably slower.
Web apps ignoring these types of conventions are fine, but the key issue is that a lot of sites aren't web apps/don't need to be web apps yet are built like they are regardless.
For example, your average news site. So many of them are built as single page applications with JavaScript frameworks like React or Angular, and for what purpose? None. At their core, they're basically blogs. They would work much better with traditional server side rendering and standard page loads and what not.
Same with stuff like Reddit. At it's core, its just a set of forums, with the vote button and a few other minor aspects being the only thing that could possibly benefit from JavaScript. Same with Wikia, which seems to have forgotten its a wiki host and not an application platform.
And the list goes on and on. Why? Probably because either the management team like to think they're 'on the forefront of web technology', ala Google or because the developers wish they were working for Google/Facebook/whatever.
Many sites really are seriously overdesigned and over engineered.
That was one the clearest guideline description I've ever readen in my life.
Obviously I'm not surprise this was written by an Engineer , it's very clear about what to do and what not.
Usually trainings and guidelines made from Designer are useless to developer , they talk about emotion , colors , moods etc... Which is key for marketing and UX but does not help a developer improve it's skill in UI .
Skill in UI, or if something should work generally for everybody, or optimized for a specific audience, is audience dependent.
Design is basically cultural anthropology, extracting real world types and positioning products to adress those types.
Technically it's tough to sperate both worlds, because layout (grids) and behavior (transitions, animations) have strong stylistic implications. This then means that a developer skilled in UI (making it work generally) can't adress specific audiences, most likely racing to the bottom (too many others doing the same and competing for the same general audience).
322 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 341 ms ] threadAs you can see, it’s been really great for our mental health :) [2]. I can appreciate this style of architecture from an intellectual level, but to be around these kinds of buildings daily is a little exhausting.
Sources:
[1]https://www.flickr.com/photos/ericejohnson/6344277129/in/pho...
[?] Word of mouth.
[2]https://www.princetonreview.com/college-rankings?rankings=le...
Indeed. There are many things – not only architecture – that are interesting to look at for a bit, maybe on paper, but that I would never want to actually have around me in my life. It seems that some people do not consider this difference. Architecture is particularly troublesome, since others force it upon you. You cannot choose it like you can choose what music to engage with, for example.
I find the Barbican in London — which I walk through most days — to be a very uplifting building!
Most all other examples just feel like dystopian nightmares.
There are many exceptional examples of brutalist architecture in Paris, some well kept, some not so much:
http://www.anothermag.com/design-living/9587/the-brutalist-b...
When I was last at the Barbican I found it very hard to navigate, and I was relieved to be told by the staff there about the many “alterations” they’ve had to make to try to make the building less confusing and alien.
Other brutalist buildings are just horid. I worked in Sampson House (just behind Tate Modern) for a couple of years which is also brutalist but the interior is dank corridors and dingy spaces. I also worked at the brutalist IBM offices next door to the National Theatre and it was also a souless space inside. They have absolutely zero-ambition and are the polar opposite of the spaces at the Barbican and National Theatre.
No, there are objectively terrible styles.
I think we all benefit from a little bit of useless ornament. Unadorned brut concrete rapidly becomes so ugly that some buildings became notorious suicide spots.
Well at least they grow some function as opposed to the most of the contemporary web.
Concrete and stone exteriors really go from great to horrific if they're not sealed properly.
Of course I'm sure brutalism can be done badly too (like anything), and I haven't spent time on the inside of too many others... but there can be something profound about it -- a modern building in balance that tries to be exactly what it is, no more, no less.
I really like a lot of brutalist architecture, but much of it is far LESS functional/useful/practical than other styles. Brutalism was an aesthetic, largely a reaction to existing forms--many of which were characterized by their utility! A lot of brutalist architects were rebelling against the bourgeois notion of a building as merely (as they saw it) "a place intended for humans to live, work, and play", and instead asserting the notion of a building as an artistic form in its own right, which often meant intentionally disregarding or downplaying the importance of the building's utility for the humans who interacted with it! Anyone who has lived or worked in a brutalist building can aver this truth: if the building served its function w/r/t humans, it was often DESPITE its artistic intentions, which prioritized almost everything else instead.
It's totally enjoyable to read the content on that page.
Even the ad is ok. And I would expect it to perform better then the average Adsense ad.
But I'm not sure that "Brutalist" is the best name for it, as it carries a connotation of harsh, even ugly architecture designed around the materials, which brutalizes the user, whereas this web design is all about presenting the content in the best, least distracting way for the user ("When in doubt, do what Tron does: fight for the users.").
Sure the name is edgy & gets attention, but...
“The term brutalism is derived from the French betón brut, meaning “raw concrete”.”
Whereas the ideas are quite sound (and common sense). I also find it weird, to say the least, that so many people seem to rediscover those ideas that have been known -and advocated- FOREVER by people with a clue (look at Jacob Nielsen for an example).
I also enjoy the irony that the writer uses a VERY BIG font for the titles (H1), that "brutalizes" (LOL) my eyes, especially the HUGE title of the article: they are MUCH too big.
BTW, it's "béton brut" not "betón brut", the typo makes it seem really weird for french people. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9ton_brut .
http://brutalistwebsites.com/
https://www.google.com/search?q=web%20brutalism
Indeed - my copy of his "Designing Web Usability" was published in 2000, and the OP is basically a re-statement of the principles in this book.
Well, I owe few years that kickstarted my career at a very nice income level to it, but all 3 years as a webdev I hated with passion every request of squeezing js animation into every part of the page. God thanks web development is a thing of the past for me
Though, that dude who incessantly pushes his imaginary "design trend" to every major website is not much a "lesser evil"
It is an "ingenious" business model to raise up hype over "the new great design trend" nobody heard about, and then sell your expertise in it and your design "services" at six digits per project
The issue is that sites which are primarily content delivery platforms adopted Web 2.0 principles as well, which was completely unecessary.
But I think you'd agree that Facebook and Trello and Google Maps are all good uses of a web that has moved beyond Hypertext.
I specifically refer to the design trend that spun off from the greater concept. In 9 out of 10 webdev projects, and how it is understood by "business dudes" web 2.0 is only a some kind of design trend, no more. And a kind with 20 animation scripts per page.
That's 99% of marketing: figure out a thing that nobody really needs, figure out a way to make them think they need it, then sell it to them at a ridiculous price.
I suppose a weird mix of sizings is a key characteristic of brutalism though!
Summarizing:
1. Don't break accessibility
2. Clearly label hyperlinks
3. Make sure your buttons look like buttons
4. Dont paginate for the sole purpose of padding engagement numbers
5. No to decorations that distract from the content
6. Dont break the back button
7. 'Performance is not a feature'
I think you meant to say "Performance IS a feature." (That is what the page says as well)
The example that a long book of text downloads in a second seems to be saying the latter..
An argument that no one listens to, which is why the web isn't performant and is instead full of bloated junk. They are acting like performance isn't even a feature, like users don't care about it and shouldn't have it. This is wrong.
^-- Is what that section is saying.
Apparently it could also be titled "Guidelines to make the web great again" or "Guidelines for blogs in 1995" for all the relevance to modern web design.
But then I opened the link and was pleasantly surprised: finally a website that uses the term “brutalist” properly!
[0] http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com
http://tachyons.io/
I see what it's getting at and I can understand why you'd like that general style, but I don't think this is a good example of it.
I still log all post requests. After five years I've gotten less than 10 non spam submissions to the bogus link.
That's something I'm going to keep in mind.
If high contrast is painful to look at, and you can't control web designers throughout the world, but you can control your own web browser... then why are you still suffering?
Laptops tend to have the ability to conveniently adjust brightness, but then everyone went with ambient light sensors, and because they’re really pretty terrible at getting it right, laptop and OS manufacturers opted for erring on the side of excessive brightness, and so laptop screens are normally somewhere between too bright and way too bright.
Desktop screens tend to be hard to adjust the brightness of, because the physical unit’s OSD approach to changing brightness is awful, and OS vendors haven’t hooked anything helpful into it for reasons that quite escape me. So most people still have their screens set at the default brightness level, which is way too bright for anything but direct sunlight.
I remember with fondness CRTs that had a physical brightness dial that you could turn. So much better than what we have now.
Phone screens… yeah, they’re normally too bright too for similar reasons to laptops. Again I criticise ambient light sensors.
I went to quite some length to get the screen brightnesses for my Windows laptop and the external displays I normally use even vaguely sane, involving obscure freeware from ten years ago and deep diving into Windows APIs; there are basically two different APIs for working with display brightnesses: laptops’ internal displays use one, and external displays use the other (the internal display is also available through the other, but it doesn’t actually work for changing brightness). Said other API which external monitors need is exposed absolutely nowhere in any UI at all. (Windows basically lies about being unable to adjust brightness of external displays in its Settings app.) Screen-brightness-adjusting keys don’t seem to be interceptable (no hooking onto XF86MonBrightnessUp and XF86MonBrightnessDown as I did on my previous, Arch Linux, laptop), so your only recourse for linking the external displays’ brightness would be detecting the internal monitor’s brightness changing and effecting. (Incidentally, the jump from 0% brightness to 10% brightness is consistently massive on LCDs; I worked around this on Linux by making a logarithmic scale wrapper around xbacklight, but I can’t fix that conveniently on this laptop.)
At present, I just type “b 0”, “b 40” or whatever into Command Prompt and it invokes a CLI-based external-screen-brightness-adjusting program.
In my home office, my external displays normally operate at 20–40% brightness during the day, though I’ve gone up to 70% on occasion before, and 0% brightness during the evening (and I’d prefer −20–−10%; most screens’ minimum brightness is unreasonably bright).
It’s not anyone’s job as a web designer to insist they're wrong.
I will continue to recommend that people reduce their brightness in almost all cases. That’s my job as a friendly person.
As a web developer, though, there is little scope for insisting that they’re wrong, which is why I say we have to take most people’s badly configured monitors into account.
But this goes both ways. I've seen developers complain about the W3C accessibility standards on contrast because it looks too severe on their retina display full-brightness Macbook.
But the relative cost of having too much contrast (it's uncomfortable to read, but still perfectly legible) and the relative ease of fixing it (turn down your laptop brightness) is very minor when compared against the many people with crappy, low-light displays that can't adjust their brightness or fix the problem of low contrast text.
Often what people mean when they say to optimize for what people have is that they'd prefer to optimize for the highest quality devices first. But for a nontrivial number of websites and demographics, those devices are the minority, and in those situations high-contrast black-on-white text will look better on a wider variety of the devices that ordinary people are using.
Just off-black on a slightly creamy white.
May even stick with #000 for text.
Giving users ability to select a white, off-white, inverse, or solarised scheme is also useful.
See also https://contrastrebellion.com
My variant:
https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/pen/KpMqqB
A sensible max-width and line-height can do wonders for readability, to the point that there are "reading mode" extensions that do pretty much just that.
This site has main.max-width = 34em and line-height = 1.5 which is a good choice in my opinion.
There also seems to be some nice vertical rhythm going on with the paragraph and title spacing.
ugh, please justify !
If it is the hardest to read, why is it used in print? What distinguishes print from electronic media that means that justification works in one place but not the other?
I would be particularly interested to read anything recent that considers legibility in print, the advent of high pixel density displays, and the impact of good justification such as that offered by microtype.
I'm slightly biased here: I believe that justification has got a bad reputation due to how badly web browsers (especially Chrome which doesn't even support hyphenation) handle it.
Browsers are indeed bad at it, but we don't need fully justified text in the first place. For me personally, I prefer varying line lengths because I can easily keep track where the previous line was.
https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/93429/why-is-text-jus...
https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/24025/should-text-on-...
Thank you for taking the time to respond, though. I had not heard the columns-as-line-separators argument before, but I'm not sure I buy it as most books are justified but do not use multiple columns.
> with tons of displays we can't be sure how the text will look fully justified.
This argument could be applied to ragged text, too. Are you saying that you can't be sure how it looks and therefore you can't justify it? The answer then seems to simply be "compute the layout on the client", as is done anyway.
> Are you saying that you can't be sure how it looks and therefore you can't justify it?
No, I'm saying it's unpredictable so we should avoid using it, while left aligned text is the default that works best in any circumstance.
Huh? I would think that, for every fully justified line there’s a left-justified one with the same content that is, at worst, equally wide, but typically less wide.
I think full justification traditionally is done for aesthetics, possibly with a bit of “look what we can do” added (it takes a better typesetter to set a line fully justified than it does to set a left-justified one with equal-sized spacing, even when both cases use kerning)
Justification makes sense when you can hyphenate words, that way you can pack more letters, otherwise the whole word would break into the next line.
”In left-aligned text, hyphenation evens the irregular right edge of the text, called the rag.”
In Grid Systems in Graphic Design (1981) the author argued against justification because he thought having spaces of different lengths between words created a poor rhythm (I will find the exact quote tomorrow).
I do think multi-column layouts are sorely underutilised on the web. Modern websites make a mockery of desktop wide-screen displays where they use about a quarter of the screen and fill the rest with adverts.
Maybe I'm just a contrarian.
Browser are pretty bad typesetting engines. Word breaking doesn't work very well, they don't and can't do protrusion or expansion. The low resolution of displays means you microadjustments don't really work, because they at most slightly shift contrast from one anti-aliased edge to the opposing edge.
Justified text works very well if you're able to competently apply all those techniques (e.g. MS Word and similar document editors didn't do any of that for a long time).
Bad justification results in rivers, uneven spacing, broken edges etc.
Yeah its time for that person to take a marketing class.
Despite my website having best-in-class content, it took a custom wordpress theme for people to begin taking it seriously/sharing. My conversion doubled overnight.
"But that's the last 2 generations did things, I can't possibly imagine any other way for life to work"
We don't talk about providing value in academia, I assume they don't talk about providing value in philanthropic organizations or political movements. Whenever I hear the term it essentially means "to make money".
I appreciate that this is my personal interpretation of this though
I am not surprised. The requirement to provide value in academia would go very much against getting any funding for it.
Are you annoyed that you just received Hackers News, which is a piece of marketing for Ycombinator?
Please don't encourage people taking advertising classes. The internet needs less marketing not more.
That's quite a claim. I'm not sure which website is your's so I can't dispute it. Personally, I frequent websites with higher quality content and avoid "gotta-sell-you-something" sites.
Also, as another commentor mentioned: > It sounds like you applied styling to improve your conversion rates
The problem is, the design here is comfortable and pleasant to read, but every example of Brutalist architecture I've seen exudes... well.. brutality. Those buildings look like they come from a dystopian future where fascist robots took over.
It's a good guide, but poor branding. To me, an actual Brutalist website would be what you see when you view a site's source - raw, unparsed HTML, left to the viewer to make sense of.
Off the top of my head, these are my impressions of what "brutalist web style" means at the moment:
- Playful departure from what western web society considers "good design" in 2018
- Experimental execution of white space occasionally using zero margins, less line spacing, unusual or no grids
- Limited color palettes, black with neon splashes of color
- Text frequently overlaps images (negative margins)
- Nostalgic of early web aesthetics with frequent nods to zine print design
HTML pages back then looked too brutal to our eyes, so we visually borrowed from what it was more aesthetically close: Print Design.
We used data tables to design layouts. We used print design tools (PhotoShop, etc) to design shapes, shadows, gradients, custom fonts, even rounded corner (Web 2.0 all-rounded trend came out when browser implemented the border-radius propriety).
Nowadays CSS let us design complex layouts without the need of graphic software. But more than that, in all these years we developed a common “web aesthetic”: Today HTML looks less brutal to our eyes than 27 years ago.
This was true even for photography: it took almost 100 years before it was seen as something else other than an “art for failed painters”.
Beyond this, the author also minifies his 'built by hand' HTML and includes a few other blobs of webpack-bundled JavaScript code. Sure, this is all not-unexpected for run-of-the-mill websites these days, I was just expecting a better example from a web-design manifesto advocating the exact opposite.
I disagree. I'll grant that if you narrowly idealize 'the visitor' to be a content-consumer who never chooses to 'view source' (let alone use a command-line user-agent to interact with a website), minifying/bundling HTML/JS doesn't affect the 'visitor experience' design.
However, hidden tracker JavaScript definitely impacts every visitor's experience, and directly betrays the 'honest and transparent interaction with a visitor' the author desires:
> a button agrees to submit the visitors information to the server. Hiding this interaction behind a hyperlink or unadorned text betrays the core nature of a website.
The JavaScript tracker hides its interaction behind the browser's JavaScript engine, which is a much greater betrayal than any poorly-styled hyperlink or button.
I’m not much of a designer, so I wonder what the main differences between “minimalism” and “brutalism” are. To me, I’m ok with sites running analytics and an ad or two, so long as I can read all the content in one go without the page stuttering on my phone or redirecting me suddenly.
But now, lot of “websites” are actually apps, where there are complex interactions, dynamic information, complex workflows and tools. I don’t think the same approach works anymore
I don’t think anyone who complains about the complex or visual designs of web apps, complains that same way about their native or mobile apps. Do you really want your desktop windows to be all full screen boxes on white background, every action as a blue underlined link? Do you want your programming ide look this way? Do you want that every time you change a view in your apps there is a full page reload of the content? This is where the complex designs, react, animation, data and state management comes in to make the user experience more fluid, enjoyable, understandable, and hopefully meeting the needs of the users.
There is some fair critisim that some or many websites are over designed and over engineered for various reasons. I also see that lot of the web frontend basics are now forgotten or ignored, you just create everything with JavaScript, and then spend half of the time trying fix or rebuild the functionality browsers provide with html out of the box.
Most sites aren't that, though, even if their devs think they are. LinkedIn and Twitter and Reddit are just plain old boring mostly-static collections of pages.
They might have a few good reasons to screw up their UI anyway, though:
- They can attract devs who want on the bandwagon,
- The "man on the street" might actually like crap like the Reddit redesign. Let's not blindly assume that our aesthetic preferences are shared by the public, even if they seem like a clear moral good to us (and especially if that moral intuition is informed by a technical background that is not widely shared.)
For example, your average news site. So many of them are built as single page applications with JavaScript frameworks like React or Angular, and for what purpose? None. At their core, they're basically blogs. They would work much better with traditional server side rendering and standard page loads and what not.
Same with stuff like Reddit. At it's core, its just a set of forums, with the vote button and a few other minor aspects being the only thing that could possibly benefit from JavaScript. Same with Wikia, which seems to have forgotten its a wiki host and not an application platform.
And the list goes on and on. Why? Probably because either the management team like to think they're 'on the forefront of web technology', ala Google or because the developers wish they were working for Google/Facebook/whatever.
Many sites really are seriously overdesigned and over engineered.
Obviously I'm not surprise this was written by an Engineer , it's very clear about what to do and what not.
Usually trainings and guidelines made from Designer are useless to developer , they talk about emotion , colors , moods etc... Which is key for marketing and UX but does not help a developer improve it's skill in UI .
Technically it's tough to sperate both worlds, because layout (grids) and behavior (transitions, animations) have strong stylistic implications. This then means that a developer skilled in UI (making it work generally) can't adress specific audiences, most likely racing to the bottom (too many others doing the same and competing for the same general audience).
Sick and tired of the fancy white space shit where the back button doesn't work and so on