Let’s talk about the Brutalist style.
Laughing in the face of design.
I’ll be honest, I now officially hate design. I’ve started hated writing as well, so don’t expect a full-blown article. I’ll just go over why I shifted from writing fancy JS (Or let’s be honest, copying from Codepen) to using a single CSS file. Keep in mind this might be a Friday 4 AM writing more than anything else, to get back into productive mode.
The idea of designing for the web has always been to show off the capabilities your deployed devs have. But with the advent of Web 2.0 ( the term is bullshit ), the idea has been to show restraint but to still show off front-end functionalities. But functionality takes a head with Brutalism movement. I was going through Balenciaga’s Website and was surprised that how a fashion company would let go of fancy designs and stick to a design that reminded me of early Internet days, which is funny because now we got amazing rendering engines capable of rendering VR views in the browser. They weren’t minimalist or flat, just straight-up brutal. Given they are a 100-year old legend in the industry, but so are a ton of other companies! So at first, I chalked it up to the stature they have in the industry.
Fuckin’ Bullshit.
They just did it because they can. So did this website and this one too, because why the fuck not. I mean off the top of my head, Yeezy Supply website opens in 0.7 s on my system. I can minify my files, use CDNs, find a 100 dollar per month host, have perfectly optimized dependency but can’t compete with a website if all it has to load is times new roman (probably available on your device), one HTML and one CSS (Let’s focus only on the frontend for now). Yeezy Supply loads a fuckton of images in 0.7 seconds, that’s a level of functionality one does not expect unless you have a brutal design.
Obviously, I am overselling Brutal design here because I hate designing now (Got exploited a lot) , and I hate hoping my CSS works every time I hit refresh. Maybe also because my new eCommerce startup will focus on functionality over design. Maybe I’ll make it pink and white.
Signing off.
