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).
It's All Over
It has come to seem to me recently that this present moment must be to language something like what the Industrial Revolution was to textiles. A writer who works on the old system of production can spend days crafting a sentence, putting what feels like a worthy idea into language, only to find, once finished, that the internet has already produced countless sentences that are more or less just like it, even if these lack the same artisanal origin story that we imagine gives writing its soul. There is, it seems to me, no more place for writers and thinkers in our future than, since the nineteenth century, there has been for weavers.
Into the system of flight
It seems this transformation, from physical object to vector of data, is a general and oft-repeated process in the history of technology, where new inventions begin in an early experimental phase in which they are treated and behave as singular individual things, but then evolve into vectors in a diffuse and regimented system as the technology advances and becomes standardized.
In the early history of aviation, airplanes were just airplanes, and each time a plane landed or crashed was a singular event. Today, I am told by airline-industry insiders, if you are a billionaire interested in starting your own airline, it is far easier to procure leases for actual physical airplanes, than it is to obtain approval for a new flight route. Making the individual thing fly is not a problem; inserting it into the system of flight, getting its data relayed to the ATC towers and to flightaware.com, is.
The gutting of our human subjecthood
Someone who thinks about their place in the world in terms of the structural violence inflicted on them as they move through it is thinking of themselves, among other things, in structural terms, which is to say, again among other things, not as subjects. This gutting of our human subjecthood is currently being stoked and exacerbated, and integrated into a causal loop with, the financial incentives of the tech companies. People are now speaking in a way that results directly from the recent moneyballing of all of human existence.
A performative contradiction
I have found myself coming away from discussions with my good PR people feeling vaguely guilty that I do not have enough followers on Twitter (five thousand is the cut-off, I think) to be considered an “influencer,” or even just a “micro-influencer,” and feeling dismayed to learn that part of what is involved in launching a book like this into the world is strategizing over how to catch the attention of a true influencer, for a retweet or some other metrically meaningful shout-out. You would be a fool to think that it is the argument of the book, the carefully crafted sentences themselves, that are doing the influencing.
And yet for me to try to insert myself into the metrics-driven system would be a performative contradiction, since the book itself is an extended philippic against this system. And so what I do? I play along, as best I can, until I start to feel ashamed of myself. I contradict myself.
The one reveals a subject and the other reveals an algorithm
My own book may be crap, but I am certain, when such an imbalance in profitability as the one I have just described emerges, between photojournalism and selfies, that it is all over. This is not a critical judgment. I am not saying that the photos of Pol Pot are good and the selfies are bad. I am saying that the one reveals a subject and the other reveals an algorithm, and that when everything in our society is driven and sustained in existence by the latter, it is all over.