brutalism
177 Huntington
Guidelines for Brutalist Web Design
An Article by David Bryant Copeland- Content is readable on all reasonable screens and devices.
- Only hyperlinks and buttons respond to clicks.
- Hyperlinks are underlined and buttons look like buttons.
- The back button works as expected.
- View content by scrolling.
- Decoration when needed and no unrelated content.
- Performance is a feature.
This page is a truly naked, brutalist html quine
An Article by Leon BambrickI decided to make a truly naked, brutalist html page, that is itself a quine. And this page is it.
Viewing the source of this page should reveal a page identical to the page you are now seeing. Nothing is hidden. It's a true "What you see is what you get."
What On Earth is a Brutalist Website?
An ArticleSome of the web’s early richness has gradually been getting lost in a sea of landing pages, hero images, sans-serifs, and calls-to-action. “Web brutalism” is a valid reminder that there is still a world of possibilities out there, if we are bold enough to break free of our UI kits and stock photos.
Web Brutalism, seamfulness, and notion
An Essay by Brandon DornHow a tool for sensemaking reconciles two distinct software design ideologies.
- Seamful vs. seamless
- Reveling in infrastructure
- The brilliance of notion
- How our understanding is working
The split personality of brutalist web development
An ArticleWhen brutalist web design isn’t going all in on rationalism and functionality, it’s laughing in the face of rationalism and functionality. All clear?
The term has grown to encompass approaches that are in many senses at odds with each other. Indeed, Pascal Deville, who founded the Brutalist Websites directory after coining the term in 2014, thinks the style has splintered into three micro-stylistics:
- Purists,
- UX minimalists,
- Anti-ists (or artists).
Beyond Artboards
The Pursuit of Lossless Design-Development Handoffs.
Can't developers just see?
We designers love artboards. From rough UI sketches to high fidelity mockups, we see ourselves as visual artists expressing ideas on artboards that have a pre-defined width and height. To start a new project, we declare the size of the artboard in the first step.
What about responsive design? Not a problem! We diligently design on three artboards — one for mobile, one for tablet, and one for desktop — with content elegantly adapting, scaling, reflowing, reordering, and reprioritizing. We proudly hand off the artboards to developers while patting ourselves on the back: this is how responsive design should be done.
After weeks of arduous engineering, the product finally comes out. We find, to our great dismay, that some copy is hanging off the grid, the focal point of the hero image has been cropped out, the font sizes don’t even come close to the type ramp. What went wrong? Can’t the developers just see everything on all those artboards?
Nope.
We are the ones who paved the path
No matter how many screen sizes our artboards account for, some user’s browser will break loose from our prescription. With users resizing, rotating, and zooming the screen, new devices stretching, squashing, curving, and cutting (e.g. the speaker area in iPhone X) the screen, the sizes become infinite. Good luck making an artboard for each one of them.
Artboards are a lossy format. Using artboards in a handoff is a lossy process. When we pitch a finite number of plans against an infinite number of situations. We inevitably get in-betweens. Once there are in-betweens, there are unknowns. Once there are unknowns there is guesswork. Once there is guesswork, there are surprises. Engineers take the path of least resistance. We are ones who paved the path.
Until we get there
- As a designer, learn writing HTML, or better still, semantic HTML. If coding up the entire design is too hard, try coding up one component at a time, and not worrying about CSS. The HTML alone will prove invaluable for developers to understand the content structure. In addition, you are forced to optimize the information architecture as you work out the code from content.
- If coding by yourself is out of the question, pair up with the engineer who will receive the design. Work closely with him or her to prototype the design, validate responsive behaviors, and obtain feedback on the feasibility. Don’t call it an iteration until the design has seen played with in code.
- As a manager for large enterprise, co-locate your designers and developers, encourage interdisciplinary learning, understand that each minute spent on coding before the handoff translates to ten minutes saved from changing and fixing issues after the handoff.
- As a stakeholder in the handoff meeting, give the designer a thumbs-up when he or she demos live code running in browsers in place of mockups on artboards. That’s a design champion you are looking at.