Neubrutalism is taking over the web? (hype4.academy)

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

(that cover was actually 2003!)

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

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.

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.

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.

Not according to the dictionary.

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

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

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

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.

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.

> 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?

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

Thanks for the helpful explanation!

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.

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.

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

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.

I like the technological excess, but with good foundations, so a page's basic function should survive without JS etc.

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.

Pah, neobrutalism is just sparkling concrete.

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.

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.)

See also:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Béton_brut

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

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.

> 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.

>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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

>This is like implying Java and JavaScript are related.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.