Brutalism and Antidesign

“Bold.” “Unapologetic.” “Honest.” “Hideous.”

In the past few years, brutalist web design has been slowly demanding attention and gaining popularity among some designers. At first, like most design trends, it was largely contained in cutting-edge design spaces (designer portfolios, digital agency sites, art-museum sites, etc.)

Within what’s widely described as web brutalism there are two distinct styles:

• Brutalism, which derives its philosophy from an earlier architectural movement
• Antidesign, which is often also referred to as brutalism, but has different goals and is expressed differently

Now we’re hearing some designers advocate for the inclusion of brutalist and antidesign principles in products. It’s worth pausing to consider where these styles come from, the intentions behind them, and what they mean for UX.

Brutalism

Like minimalist design, brutalist digital design descends from an earlier movement. Web brutalism is inspired by the brutalist architecture of the 1950s. Brutalist buildings are characterized by their heavy and ‘ruthless’ appearance.

Brutalism in digital design is a style that intentionally attempts to look raw, haphazard, or unadorned. It echoes early 1990s-style websites (think Craigslist and the Drudge Report). Sometimes this aspect of brutalism is expressed as bare-bones, almost naked HTML site with blue links and monochromatic Monospace text.

Both in architecture and in digital design, brutalism is seen as a reaction against artificiality and lightness. Proponents praise it for its honesty and daring.

Brutalist designers want to break away from the stale, cookie-cutter, premade-template sites that dominate the web today. They want the web to be true to itself, to feel honest and not contrived. The brutalist philosophy shares that last goal with flat design, though the two aesthetic styles achieve it in very different ways.

NN/g utilized this style for many years, deliberately using a stripped-down UI even as fancier visual design (and Flash animations) became popular in the 2000s. Our goal was to prioritize function over form, as well as to take advantage of the reflective emotional-design effect this approach provoked among usability fans, who justifiably were opposed to overly flashy design.

Antidesign

Web brutalism is beginning to take on a new meaning, quite different from the spirit of the architectural movement. Rather than just focusing on stripped-down UIs with raw or nonexistent styling, some designers interpret brutalism to mean rebelling against oversimplified design by intentionally creating ugly, disorienting, or complex interfaces.

Though some lump this trend in with brutalism, it doesn’t fit with the original architectural sense of the word. For the sake of clarity, I’ll use the term antidesign to refer to this separate understanding of the movement.

Antidesign sites often feature a complete lack of visual hierarchy. Some use harsh colors, disorienting patterns, weird cursors, and unnecessary distracting animations. The overall effect feels like bad 1990s’ designs on steroids. Worse than Geocities, if you can believe it.

When to Use Antidesign (And When Not to Use It)

Why would someone deliberately try to make their design look bad, unfinished, or difficult to use? There are a few motivations, and they aren’t mutually exclusive.

Humor

Many of these antidesigns are created as an inside joke for designers, who can see them as ironic.

Attention

Truly outrageous antidesign sites (like the conference site for Bloomberg Businessweek Design 2016) can be perceived as edgy and provocative. Even those people who hate the design will visit the site and send it to their peers to criticize it. Any publicity is good publicity.

‘Freshness’

This is the motivation for antidesign that concerns me the most. Some designers are becoming bored with simple, straightforward, polished design. For them, antidesign brings complexity and novelty that they feel their products have been lacking.

I’ve heard advocates of antidesign argue that this is better for users too. They say that users need to be challenged, and that complex experiences are more memorable and enjoyable. (We found that idea ridiculous enough to make it into an April Fool’s article.) There are really only two contexts in which those assertions might be true:

• Your audience is composed of designers, illustrators, or artists. They might understand the reasoning behind a chaotic, raw design, and ‘get’ the inside joke. They’re likely more skilled at using digital products, so they might be able to handle a more difficult UI. And the unique design style might help your product or brand stand out, and make it more memorable. Bloomberg’s Businessweek Design conference site was intended for a designer audience, so it may have been appropriate for them.
• Your product is meant for entertainment. People won’t be trying to use your product to find anything or accomplish any specific task. Interaction doesn’t have to be smooth, and discoverability is more important than findability. Ideally, this would be an entertainment product meant for designers or artists.

If your situation doesn’t match either of those contexts, an antidesign UI will backfire.

Remember: you are not the user. You may find many designs too boring or too simple, but the majority of the users of the web would likely disagree with you.

Antidesign has provoked resistance in the UX community, because in many ways its goals feel like the antithesis of UX design. In criticism of what it calls brutalism (but what I would describe as antidesign), uxdesign.cc created satirical brutalist UX deliverables: “[…] throw elements on the screen, without worrying too much about how they work together. Who are you to define hierarchy anyway? Let each element fight for the spotlight.”

Digital interfaces are becoming simpler and more streamlined because that’s what users need and want. That’s what we as a field have learned over decades of user research. But simplicity doesn’t have to mean uniformity. There is plenty of room to be creative while helping people understand your content and complete their tasks. We don’t need to make things harder for our users just to stand out, or to keep them interested.

That concept reminds me of the complex writing style of William Faulkner. His novels are notoriously challenging to read. His sentences are sometimes convoluted, sometimes segmented, and often grammatically incorrect. Although reading Faulkner is difficult, it’s beautiful. It feels like reading poetry.

There are places to make things feel beautifully disjointed, or intentionally challenging. But, for most of us, our digital product is not that place. We aren’t writing Faulkner here. People don’t want to solve a puzzle when they use a product: looking around, paying attention, making inferences, reading, and thinking are all hard work. They don’t want to be challenged. They just want to keep living their lives.

When to Use Brutalism

To leverage the brutalist style, keep it limited to visual design. Don’t break your visual hierarchy, navigation, or interaction design just for the sake of novelty. And stick to pure brutalism, while avoiding antidesign like the plague it’ll be for your business metrics.

Keep Your Ego Out of It

Brutalism and antidesign are gaining in popularity. Beyond digital products, these styles are influencing print design (e.g. Condé Nast Traveler, and other magazines) and the music industry (e.g. the album artwork for Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo and Taylor Swift’s reputation). They’re seeping into popular culture (which seems counterintuitive for a supposedly nonconformist trend).

You may feel pressure to adopt this new design trend. Before doing it, really think about whether adopting it would be best for your organization and your users. Are you shaking things up because it will truly improve how users/customers/readers feel about your product, or because you are bored and feeling unchallenged?