Daily Shaarli

All links of one day in a single page.

October 29, 2023

Brutalist Web Design

A website that embraces Brutalist Web Design is raw in its focus on content, and prioritization of the website visitor.

A website is about giving visitors content to enjoy and ways to interact with you.

Guidelines:

  • 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.

The only limitation of brutalist web design is that it is designed for content and not interactions. So this design method does not fit dashboards of real-time data for example. Am I missing something here?

I appreciate the guidelines that can be reused on every usable and accessible website or applications.

A quickstart tip:

Start with left-aligned black text on a white background, and to apply styling only to solve a specific problem

and more tips:

  • Understand the semantic meaning of HTML elements.
  • Learn about typography.
  • Try designing for a small screen by default.
  • Learn from designers about their choices and why they made them.
  • When in doubt, do what Tron does: fight for the users.