10 Brutalist Websites to Inspire Your Next Web Design Project

Last Updated on September 21, 2022 by 31 Comments

10 Brutalist Websites to Inspire Your Next Web Design Project
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Web design trends change all the time. By the time you find a designer you can work with, decide on a look everyone can agree with, get the work done, and finally go live, what’s cool and fresh and trendy has changed. Enter brutalist websites.

What’s that, you ask? It’s when you buck the trends and purposefully design your website to be ugly. And if it’s not straight-up ugly, it’s at least free of frivolous/superfluous design elements.

Brutalist websites are a relatively new thing among purposeful designs, but a lot of them draw inspiration from the early days of the internet. The days when Angelfire and Geocities were the pinnacle of awesomeness. The days when the only HTML you needed to know were a href and img src.

The web has moved on since then, but good (or maybe good-bad?) design hasn’t. On one hand, brutalism is about function over form. If it works, let it work. On the other, it’s about being punk af and making the user work for whatever they get out of your site.

No matter which way you wanna go with it, I’m sure you can find a way to brutalize your next design project after you’ve checked out these glorious monstrosities.

1. craigslist.org

brutalist websites

Y’all, Craigslist is ugly. No, don’t defend it. It’s a monster. Black text, blue links, white background. It’s not pretty. But it doesn’t have to be.

Because it works. That’s what is important. Part of brutalism is UX, and CL has that down. You can find what you need to buy or sell without any fuss or muss or extraneous moving parts.

2. Konsept83.com

brutalist websites

Like Craigslist, Konsept83 looks to the early days of the internet for inspiration. Grey background, typewriter font (a brutalist website staple), and all the links that spell out precisely what you’re clicking into.

The interior pages are just as spare–they just have images embedded.

3. pictureshow.tv

brutalist websites

Pictureshow.tv only works in landscape mode on mobile (or on desktops). It’s a video series designed to look and feel like an old VHS tape. You even click into the other pages, and they act like they are VCR setup menus.

But you know what? The site works, you know what to do, and you’re not lost for a moment.

But man. It’s ugly. And beautiful at the time time. And the best part is that you have no question about how to use it.

4. chris.bolin.co

brutalist websites

Have you ever seen an offline website? No? Me, either. And then I found this beauty.

Chris Bolin designed this site to be as brutal to web users as possible: you gotta disconnect to connect. Automagically, the content appears, and you see a simple message about simplicity presented simply.

Brutalism, man.

brutalist websites

brutalist websites

4. stephaniemarx.com/talks

brutalist websites

One of her talks (and the way I became acquainted with her work) is called Everything I Learned about Web Design, I Learned from Geocities.

I don’t think I need to say anything else.

5. wolftonechambers.com

brutalist websites

Talk about brutal. There is content here. Lots of it. Good info that’s well written. But it’s all but hidden from us by a sea of ASCII.

You can’t say this is visually appealing, nor is it terribly functional. But it’s memorable. It’s strangely clean despite all the clutter, and the weirdest part is that after you scroll a bit, you do see how it works and how to find info with no directions. Which means that, again weirdly, this is how UX should work.

#shrugemoji

brutalist websites

6. allanyu.nyc

brutalist websites

Part of the beauty of writing and publishing on the web is that your users don’t see the revisions and changes you make to your stuff. You can put new content out there or adjust old content, and no one will be the wiser (unless they check Wayback Machine archives).

Allan Yu, though, uses brutalism to show the revisions he makes to his site as though they’re physical revisions in a notebook. It makes the overall experience less clean overall, but the messiness adds to the user experience so everyone is aware that he not only grows in style, but ability and creativity.

Not a design you’d find on a major news outlet (wouldn’t it just be fun to see editorial marks on CNN?), but for a designer or agency who has relatively slow updates, this style would probably work well.

7. Brutalist Redesigns

brutalist websites

Making brutalist websites is far, far harder than you’d think. Because it’s easy to make a website ugly. It’s also easy to make a website simple. And it’s easy to make a website look dated.

But it’s hard to do all of those at once. So Pierre Buttin took some of the cleanest, most popular apps (like Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat) and redesigned them as examples of how you can maintain form and function while removing superfluous flash that adds nothing to the experience.

8. morgane.com/pixel- lab

brutalist websites

http://morgane.com/pixel-lab
(Maybe new pics on laptop of whole page.)

Indie video game developers are a quirky bunch. The folks at Pixel Labs don’t stray from that description. Their website is a single page that looks like it was written in the early ’90s, and the color palette probably was.

That said, they know what they’re doing. They have a showcase of their work, an invite to their Slack server, and a desire to help other people.

Their use of web design removes any obstacles between them and their audience.

9. wekflatm.kr

brutalist websites

I think this may be the perfect website. Seriously. I’m seriously considering making the page showcasing my novels work like this.

It’s ecommerce at its most fundamental and perfect: Here’s a chair. Buy it. Want a sofa? Okay. You can buy them over there.

No wish lists, no searches, no variations or user reviews. Just item, price, buy.

It ain’t pretty, but it ain’t ugly, either. It’s simple. And it has personality. It’s everything you need in a website and nothing you don’t.

10. keyaar.in

brutalist website

I bet the first thing you’d do on this site is click a shape. Because shapes. Then you’ll read the labels–which don’t really tell you much.

Thing is, though, you know pretty much what each one is when you click it. Work is a gallery of, you guessed it, work. NSFW is a blog, but even before that, you know you’re getting into something personal, if not intimate. And KL11? The design agency themselves. All the info you need is there.

What more do you people want out of a website?

Brutal, shmutal

You may not want a suite of brutalist websites in your portfolio. That’s fine. This design scheme is absolutely not for everyone, and some clients are sure to balk when you pitch an ugly site.

But there are lots of design lessons you can learn from these sites.

I do challenge you, though, to try to make a brutalist site. Boiling the whole thing all the way down to the essentials will make you confront your preconceptions, as well as your strengths and weaknesses. Sure, it’ll be brutal, but you’ll come out of it a stronger designer.

And maybe a stronger person, too.

What do you think about brutalist websites? Let us know your thoughts on this trend in the comments

Article thumbnail by Kaleo / shutterstock.com

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31 Comments

  1. Nice collection…

  2. BJ, this is my favorite article I’ve ever seen on here. It fills me with a nostalgic loathing and a wistful yearning back to making webpages with netscape all at the same time. Back then we were waiting on cross-browser compatibility. What a relief when that finally happened! wait…

  3. The sites are all quite horrible indeed! My heart aches when I see them. Oh, how romantic to live in a cage! No!! It’s damp and it stinks amd we built huts for a reason, for friggin’ sake! This being ranted: Regardless or because of this I enjoyed a beautiful read, and, the designs, too, and, yes, I am challenged and I will take brutalism into my heart – if only to use it find whatever unneseccities my designs may carry. Thank you for this!!

    • Cave, not cave, sorry.

      • Being able to edit one’s comments would be nice. Sorry for the bulk… 😉

  4. I’m trying far too hard. Once you’ve got Elegant themes, there’s a temptation to do soooo much. Nah, this has convinced me I need to keep things basic

  5. This is ridiculously tough but would be fun to achieve. Thanks for sharing, a new challenge.

  6. “Make it pop”

  7. Lol. This was a way cool article.

    • Thank you! I had fun putting this one together. 😀

  8. Awesome, will have to try this one day. Looks hard to achieve.

    • It’s very hard to achieve. When you do it wrong, it looks like gobbledygook. Believe me. 😉

  9. Great collection.

  10. This is awesome. Takes me back to when I made my first ever website using Geocities. I sure don’t miss table-based layouts though!

  11. One day I will try too

  12. You left out the most popular and most successful ‘brutalist’ web of them all: Drudge Report

  13. Content is king)

  14. Every website needs to have this look….

  15. Honestly I think it takes a genius to come up with this list because they inspires in disguise ??

  16. I’ll be short – Awesome. I’m loving it!

  17. Very fun to follow all of this websites. Thank you!

  18. I’m creating something average. Something that will get the others and they’ll look at me. =)

  19. I wish I could do this for clients, every single one that says “I want something clean and simple” and then proceed to fill it up with junk — having no idea what the terms mean.

    • 😀 Yes, every single client uses those words “clean and simple” and maybe 1% of what I build is clean and simple :D. It’s like going to the hair dresser saying “a nice and fresh cut please”.

    • Just show them this list! 😉

    • @Chris, I feel your pain buddy!
      Brutal but true…

    • have a laugh… watch ‘makemylogobiggercream’ on youtube – it’s exactly what you are talking about

      • That’s awesome. Thanks for sharing!

    • amen to that.

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