Comment by martythemaniak
3 hours ago
Right, hence why it's called "Neo-brutalist" and not "brutalist". It's not just plain un-styled html.
3 hours ago
Right, hence why it's called "Neo-brutalist" and not "brutalist". It's not just plain un-styled html.
Neo just means new. It's not an out-of-jail card if it is completely unrelated to the old/real thing.
Neo doesn't mean it can just be a completely different thing, it means its a modern take on the same thing from before but slightly evolved. Neo-Classicism still looks like Classicism. Neo Nazis are still Nazis.
If I create something called Neo-Cuisine, you'd expect the result to be edible. If I see something calling itself "Neo-Brutalist Architecture", I'd expect it to look like Brutalism, or have some hallmark of the style. e.g. raw, but a different material new to the time period).
As far as web design, there's nothing "raw" about 100s of dependencies and animated charts and rounded rects and opinionated fonts and the rest of the this pastiche in "64 components, charts and star shapes for React and Tailwind v4. Built on shadcn/ui and Base UI." This is just Corporate Memphis + dialog aesthetics[0]
[0]: https://invisible-island.net/dialog/
It's a visual style, yet all your criticisms are about under-the-hood technicalities. The style I use for my personal projects (https://frost-e.com/design-system/) is a single css file, but looks similar. Nothing is stopping you from applying this visual style to plain HTML components.
>It's a visual style, yet all your criticisms are about under-the-hood technicalities
the very point of brutalism is to turn its material 'inside out', what defines brutalism is that it makes the material and structural elements it's made of visible. It's not a 'visual style' or an aesthetic at all but an 'ethic of construction' something was brutalist if it was honest, and exposed, what a thing was made of.
If you want to apply that notion to web design It's not about 1 CSS file or 100 but whether the mechanics of CSS or HTML are still visible on the site, or if it's all buried under colors, animations, styling etc. Craigslist is a pretty good example of a brutalist website, so is this site, HN.