Comment by bradly
3 hours ago
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...
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
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/
2 replies →
“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 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?