Brutalist Web Design

Jim McCauley speaks to some of the people behind an uncompromising new trend and asks whether this is web design’s punk rock moment.

- Jim McCauley

There comes a time in every creative movement when some of its practitioners decide to push back against the accepted way of doing things and start breaking the rules, usually to the outrage of the establishment. You can see it throughout the history of art, music and literature, and it’s happening in web design now.

Named after the architectural movement from the mid-to-late 20th century, web brutalism gleefully ignores all the best practices established over the past 20 years and is throwing out work that’s inventive, exciting and challenging – even confrontational. Brutalist sites range from the wilfully chaotic to the obstinately minimal, but they’re united by a rejection of mainstream web trends.

The origins of brutalism

Brutalist architecture is unconcerned about looking attractive, and it’s this – –as well as the idea that brutalism was conceived as a reaction to the more frivolous architecture of the Thirties and Forties –– that led Pascal Deville, cofounder and creative director of Freundliche Grüsse (freundlichegruesse. com) to co-opt the term.

“I’ve had a high interest in digital design and the web design community since the early days of the web,” he tells us. “In the last couple of years I noticed a trend toward streamlined, almost neutralised interfaces that completely missed any sense of brand attributes or characteristics regarding the content or purpose they serve.” Deville also noticed designers starting to experiment with a kind of web design anti-trend: a rough and back-to-basics approach on how websites could work outside a perfect UX world, and it’s this aspect that reminded him of the original brutalists.