The rise and rise of the brutalist design trend

Default avatar.
August 25, 2016
The rise and rise of the brutalist design trend.

Brutalism in web design is raw, rough, unpolished and everything that today’s standard of the aesthetically beautiful website isn’t. It goes way beyond minimalism (which will still be beautiful when designed properly) into a bare-knuckle and extremely stripped-down design that’s been called downright ugly by some. In short, it’s a design trend that just isn’t supposed to do well in today’s best practice of usable-meets-modern…yet it is. At the very least, brutalism is making designers and everyone else take note in a way that’s very unexpected, given the irony of how this purposeful design choice is a throwback to the brutish design that did well in post-World War II Europe, where the need to rebuild inexpensively lead to cold, stark buildings that stood out like a sore thumb. The fact that brutalism in web design is on many people’s radars now is also indicative of pushback from some design circles against today’s pretty web that’s obsessed with the harmony of colors, shapes, lines and design elements.

Where did brutalism come from?

To fully understand brutalism in web design, we have to realize that its roots go back decades, to architecture and industrial design. It was very popular from the 1950s to approximately the mid-1970s and was popular with both institutional and government buildings, which is perhaps no surprise given that both types of buildings are sometimes associated with harshness, coldness and a certain kind of ugliness that’s far from comforting and easy on the eyes. In fact, brutalism as a word comes from the French for raw,” which is another apt way of describing sites that are stripped-down and have no frills or aesthetic concern. Some people may call Brutalism a design trend, others consider it anti-design. The concept applied to web design only came to the fore recently, with the popularity of brutalist​websites​.com, a site devoted to showcasing the movement.

Brutalist websites going viral

The trend was first picked up by Hacker News, but was quickly taken up by news sites including the Washington Post and CBC. Pascal Deville, creative director at a Zurich ad agency, started brutalist​websites​.com to show that designers and developers can still create engaging sites without having to use the long list of design best practices that many want to follow in today’s web. From this philosophy, we glean another insight into the approach of brutalism: It’s a sort of rebellion against the conventional way many designers approach designing for the web today. Interestingly, Deville makes the point that brutalism doesn’t just apply to the design of a site — it also applies to the backend work. In other words, to him, brutalism is just as much about the way a site is built, so if a site is a rougher, handmade, HTML site, that qualifies as brutalism, too. Brutalism is therefore a design and development approach that touches on all aspects of the site-creation process. Your site’s not really brutalist if it just has a really rough and raw look, but its code uses dozens of libraries. Similarly, your site can’t qualify as brutalist if it was handmade, but it has a very polished and attractive look that promotes all the best practices of corporate design.

Well-known sites employing brutalism

It might seem that Brutalism in web design is a relatively new trend, but actually it’s been a thing all along; it’s just that design journalists have now started taking it seriously. There are actually some well-known sites that have been proud standard bearers of this design choice for quite some time.

Apple’s WWDC16

The website for Apple’s 2016 Developers’ Conference had what some would argue is a brutalist design scheme. This represents a further distancing from the old excesses of skeuomorphism. The site features: 

  • a lot of negative (white) space;
  • very plain typeface that’s designed to mimic lines of code;
  • very few on-page elements overall.
apple

Serge Khineika’s Bio Page

Serge Khineika

is a UX and web designer whose professional website has a very raw and crude appearance. Interestingly, it as a very neat scrolling effect that reveals more edits, doodles and page elements as you scroll down. His site has the following brutalist elements: 

  • an enormous amount of white space;
  • a very basic font style;
  • one black-and-white picture;
  • graphics meant to resemble old-school edits with a pen and paper.
serge

37signals

Basecamp is a web-application company that used to be known as 37signals. The 37signals site is another memorable example of brutalism in web design since it was so stripped-down and bare-bones that it went way beyond minimalism just to the very bare necessities. Here’s what made its old site a study in brutalism. It features: 

  • a lot of white and negative space;
  • ultra-simplistic typeface;
  • very basic illustrations and graphics;
  • very little text.
37signals

Y Combinator’s Hacker News

It’s highly appropriate that the site that caused the brutalism in web design trend to go viral, is also a brutalist site in and of itself! Hacker News is a no-frills, no-gimmicks site that delivers a raw, line-by-line page of trending topics with barely any color or consideration to aesthetics: 

  • lots of white or negative space (even if part of it functions as a border);
  • very small typography that’s so hard to read users have to practically squint;
  • very simple navigation menu and footer;
  • only three colors on the site.
hackernews

Brutalism as a design choice

Brutalism in web design has been around for a long time, but it’s really exploded into the public eye in recent months. If we broaden things past web design and go into architecture, then this design approach has been around since the 1950s. What the body of evidence around brutalism makes clear, though, is that it is a design choice, above all else. It’s a knowing rejection of everything that’s attractive, easy on the eyes, and comfortable; and instead supports stark, raw ugliness in a sort of rebellion against design best practices that are meant to make us feel at ease and gives us something aesthetically pleasing. As a result, brutalism is compelling, if for nothing else than to provide an alternative to the safe confines of design conventionalism.

Marc Schenker

Marc‚Äôs a copywriter who covers design news for Web Designer Depot. Find out more about him at marcschenker​copywriter​.com.

Read Next

Exciting New Tools for Designers, June 2023

We’re halfway through 2023 already, and the number of incredible apps, tools, and resources for designers is mounting.

3 Essential Design Trends, June 2023

This month we are focusing on three trends within a bigger website design trend – different navigation menu styles and …

15 Best New Fonts, May 2023

The choices you make when selecting a typeface have more impact on your design than almost any other decision, so it’s …

10+ Best Tools & Resources for Web Designers and Agencies (2023 updated)

Having the ability to envision a tastefully designed website (i.e., the role creativity plays) is important. But being …

20 Best New Websites, May 2023

This month, there are tons of great new agency websites to get excited about. 3D animated prisms are a popular theme, a…

How to Find the Right White Label Website Builder for Your Agency

Web design agencies face a lot of obstacles in closing the deal with new clients. One of the most common ones is the ar…

Exciting New Tools For Designers, May 2023

There are hundreds of new tools for designers and developers released each month. We sift through them all to bring you…

3 Essential Design Trends, May 2023

All three of the website design trends here mimic something bigger going on in the tech space, from a desire to have mo…

10 Best AI Tools for Web Designers (2023)

It’s time to stop worrying if AI is going to take your job and instead start using AI to expand the services you can of…

10 Best Marketing Agency Websites (Examples, Inspo, and Templates!)

Marketers are skilled in developing strategies, producing visual assets, writing text with high impact, and optimizing …

15 Best New Fonts, April 2023

Fonts are a designer’s best friend. They add personality to our designs and enable fine typography to elevate the quali…

20 Best New Websites, April 2023

In April’s edition, there’s a whole heap of large-scale, and even full-screen, video. Drone footage is back with a veng…