Yeah, I can't stand these influencer-wannabe web-devs misusing terms.
béton brut means "raw concrete" in French, and in architecture that's what brutalism is. I'd say only sites that look like they use the default style of HTML with no CSS on Netscape 1.x could be called "brutalist"...
> Neobrutalism is a mix of regular brutalism in web design and more modern typography, illustration, and animation standards. Neobrutalism refuses the usual components of UX-UI design and embraces uncomfortable design elements, and it is more fearless to use distinctive color palettes.
nothing about this is neobrutalist by their own standards. There is nothing “uncomfortable” about these standard round flat shapes, and unvibrant 3/4 saturated tones, they aren’t distinct, its called Alegria[1], calling it neobrutalism is a corruption of the meaning of brutalism and comes off as distinctly uncultured.
neobrutalism should have sharp edges, very vibrant saturated colors, and virtually none of these flowery spiral shapes. (neo)brutalism is forcing a square peg in a round hole with a hammer, and leaving it like that on purpose, because the raw swedge is the aethetic.
Neo doesn't mean it can just be a completely different thing, it means its a modern take on the same thing from before but slightly evolved. Neo-Classicism still looks like Classicism. Neo Nazis are still Nazis.
If I create something called Neo-Cuisine, you'd expect the result to be edible. If I see something calling itself "Neo-Brutalist Architecture", I'd expect it to look like Brutalism, or have some hallmark of the style. e.g. raw, but a different material new to the time period).
As far as web design, there's nothing "raw" about 100s of dependencies and animated charts and rounded rects and opinionated fonts and the rest of the this pastiche in "64 components, charts and star shapes for React and Tailwind v4. Built on shadcn/ui and Base UI." This is just Corporate Memphis + dialog aesthetics[0]
It's a visual style, yet all your criticisms are about under-the-hood technicalities. The style I use for my personal projects (https://frost-e.com/design-system/) is a single css file, but looks similar. Nothing is stopping you from applying this visual style to plain HTML components.
>It's a visual style, yet all your criticisms are about under-the-hood technicalities
the very point of brutalism is to turn its material 'inside out', what defines brutalism is that it makes the material and structural elements it's made of visible. It's not a 'visual style' or an aesthetic at all but an 'ethic of construction' something was brutalist if it was honest, and exposed, what a thing was made of.
If you want to apply that notion to web design It's not about 1 CSS file or 100 but whether the mechanics of CSS or HTML are still visible on the site, or if it's all buried under colors, animations, styling etc. Craigslist is a pretty good example of a brutalist website, so is this site, HN.
It's a niche and not super-well defined, but definitely existing style, ie: https://neubrutalism.com/
Broadly, it's a move away from flat, low contrast Material-type UIs and also away from the 'gradients and curves' AI-era designs and back into something that's more like the early web.
Interesting. I had thought my own web site (https://bradlyfeeley.com) was neo-brutalist, so I was taken back by how different this design was from my own.
Really unfortunate how much I immediately associate this with vibe coded sites. So many models trend to this exact neobrutalist style when any semblance of Swiss design or minimalism is mentioned in the prompt. However, I really do like how the style looks on some sites, like in https://www.not-ship.com/united-nations-map/ which was on HN earlier.
I associate beige or purple extremely long landing pages with vibe coded
alongside infinite tangentially related features, because it lacks intention but the creator was stuck in a bout of AI psychosis
here, on the other hand, I’m wondering why they would even release this, as it should be a component for more intentional vibe coding. A Claude design template masqueraded as a whole framework
I wish. React + Tailwind as the commonly accepted default is too bad, it sacrifices portability for convenience. It's legacy code in the making, like jQuery and Bootstrap.
Dark/light, accent colors but otherwise no customization.
Going after standardized ui. Css blob with builtin font, or no font.
Kotlin components as well
I will say I'm afraid to use this style because Gemini seems to love it so much and therefore users will make assumptions about how the website was created.
That might be true for them to know it was AI. Which yes, was how I worded it. But not necessarily good enough for it to be differentiated from everything else.
For example, in the Bootstrap days everything looked like Bootstrap and users got used to that, even if users hadn't specifically heard of the CSS framework.
I love it! I've been using my own styling for my various projects that I call "Soft NeoBrutalism" that's more colourful and lower contrast since I find most neobrutalist styles to be too stark. Sample here: https://frost-e.com/design-system/
Since mine is just a hacky vibe-coded single css file, I might switch to yours with a custom colour scheme.
How is brutalism defined in this context? When I think web brutalism I think Craigslist style sites and reduction of superfluous design elements.
béton brut means "raw concrete" in French, and in architecture that's what brutalism is. I'd say only sites that look like they use the default style of HTML with no CSS on Netscape 1.x could be called "brutalist"...
E.g. https://stallman.org
IMO the design is more "Windows 3.1 Hot Dog Stand Theme" https://blog.codinghorror.com/a-tribute-to-the-windows-31-ho... combined with MS WordArt...
> Neobrutalism is a mix of regular brutalism in web design and more modern typography, illustration, and animation standards. Neobrutalism refuses the usual components of UX-UI design and embraces uncomfortable design elements, and it is more fearless to use distinctive color palettes.
neobrutalism should have sharp edges, very vibrant saturated colors, and virtually none of these flowery spiral shapes. (neo)brutalism is forcing a square peg in a round hole with a hammer, and leaving it like that on purpose, because the raw swedge is the aethetic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis
If I create something called Neo-Cuisine, you'd expect the result to be edible. If I see something calling itself "Neo-Brutalist Architecture", I'd expect it to look like Brutalism, or have some hallmark of the style. e.g. raw, but a different material new to the time period).
As far as web design, there's nothing "raw" about 100s of dependencies and animated charts and rounded rects and opinionated fonts and the rest of the this pastiche in "64 components, charts and star shapes for React and Tailwind v4. Built on shadcn/ui and Base UI." This is just Corporate Memphis + dialog aesthetics[0]
[0]: https://invisible-island.net/dialog/
the very point of brutalism is to turn its material 'inside out', what defines brutalism is that it makes the material and structural elements it's made of visible. It's not a 'visual style' or an aesthetic at all but an 'ethic of construction' something was brutalist if it was honest, and exposed, what a thing was made of.
If you want to apply that notion to web design It's not about 1 CSS file or 100 but whether the mechanics of CSS or HTML are still visible on the site, or if it's all buried under colors, animations, styling etc. Craigslist is a pretty good example of a brutalist website, so is this site, HN.
Broadly, it's a move away from flat, low contrast Material-type UIs and also away from the 'gradients and curves' AI-era designs and back into something that's more like the early web.
alongside infinite tangentially related features, because it lacks intention but the creator was stuck in a bout of AI psychosis
here, on the other hand, I’m wondering why they would even release this, as it should be a component for more intentional vibe coding. A Claude design template masqueraded as a whole framework
Dark/light, accent colors but otherwise no customization. Going after standardized ui. Css blob with builtin font, or no font. Kotlin components as well
This component library and the LLM default interpretation of the style is very much "in your face."
As an example, the black scrollbar here[0] is very heavy, a component which isn't meant to be looked at, but is distracting on first glance.
Prompting an LLM to make "lightly styled" neobrutalist is much more pleasing to my eyes, but maybe I'm alone in that.
[0]https://www.neobrutalism.dev/docs
These pages are closer to "neobrutalism" or what I would call "Cybermod" [0], I think...
<https://webb.page>
<https://garden.bradwoods.io>
[0]: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44415330>
No need to mess around further.
I will say I'm afraid to use this style because Gemini seems to love it so much and therefore users will make assumptions about how the website was created.
For example, in the Bootstrap days everything looked like Bootstrap and users got used to that, even if users hadn't specifically heard of the CSS framework.
This is a very easy sell for me because everything these days is doing the infuriating gray text on gray background.
Since mine is just a hacky vibe-coded single css file, I might switch to yours with a custom colour scheme.