Return to Brutalism
Web design is cycling back to raw, unpolished aesthetics. Here is why the polished look is fading.
Somewhere around 2015, every website on the internet started looking exactly the same. A large hero image, usually of attractive people doing something vaguely aspirational. A sans-serif font, probably Inter or Circular or something equally inoffensive. Rounded corners on everything. Soft shadows. Gentle gradients. A colour palette that wouldn't look out of place in a Scandinavian furniture showroom.
This was the aesthetic that conquered the web: professional, polished, and profoundly boring. It was design by consensus, design by template, design that said "we hired a designer" without saying anything else at all. It was safe. It was predictable. It was, in the most technical sense, absolutely fine.
And now, finally, beautifully, it's dying.
The Revolt of the Rough
The trend, if you can call something this chaotic a trend, goes by several names: brutalism, neo-brutalism, anti-design. Whatever you call it, you'll recognise it when you see it. Bold colours that clash rather than complement. Typography that screams instead of whispers. Exposed grids, raw textures, deliberate imperfections. Websites that look like they were designed by someone who'd never heard of best practices, or had heard of them and decided to set them on fire.
At first glance, it looks like a mistake. At second glance, it looks like an extremely intentional mistake. That's the point.
Brutalism in web design takes its name from Brutalist architecture, the mid-twentieth-century movement that gave us those monolithic concrete structures that people either love or desperately want to demolish. The name comes from the French béton brut—raw concrete—not from "brutal," though the confusion is understandable. Brutalist buildings exposed their materials. They didn't pretend to be anything other than what they were. They were, in their strange way, honest.
Brutalist websites follow the same philosophy. They expose the web's underlying structure rather than hiding it. They embrace the inherent weirdness of the digital medium instead of smoothing it over. They're honest about what they are—collections of text and images assembled with code—rather than pretending to be anything more sophisticated.
Why Now?
Design trends are cyclical. This is not profound insight; it's simple observation. Every dominant aesthetic eventually becomes stale, and when it does, the reaction tends to swing in the opposite direction. Maximalism follows minimalism. Ornate follows simple. Weird follows boring.
The polished, corporate look that dominated web design for the past decade was itself a reaction against earlier excesses—the skeuomorphic buttons that looked like they'd been carved from wood, the gratuitous gradients, the drop shadows that seemed to have their own postcode. Flat design and its successors were a correction. They cleaned things up. They simplified.
And then, having simplified, they kept simplifying. And then they kept simplifying some more. Until eventually everything looked the same, felt the same, conveyed nothing at all except a kind of generic professional competence.
Brutalism is the pendulum swinging back. It's designers getting bored with best practices and wondering what happens if you violate them deliberately. It's the web equivalent of punk rock: loud, abrasive, and absolutely certain that the establishment has become too comfortable.
The AI Factor
There's another reason brutalism is resurging now, and it has to do with our robot overlords.
As AI-generated content floods the internet—polished, competent, utterly soulless—there's an increasing premium on work that feels distinctly human. Imperfect. Idiosyncratic. Weird in ways that algorithms don't produce.
The polished corporate aesthetic was already trending toward the generic, but AI has accelerated that tendency to an absurd degree. You can now generate a perfectly adequate website design in seconds. The design will be professional. It will follow best practices. It will look like every other AI-generated design, which looks like every other human-designed design that followed the same templates and trends.
Brutalism is a reaction against this homogeneity. Its deliberate roughness, its intentional violations of convention, signal something that generic AI output can't: personality. Point of view. The human hand, visible in all its imperfection.
This is the paradox of the moment. As it becomes easier than ever to produce polished, professional-looking work, polished and professional-looking becomes less valuable. What's scarce—and therefore valuable—is work that feels genuinely made, genuinely considered, genuinely human.
The Philosophy Behind the Aesthetic
Beneath the clashing colours and aggressive typography, brutalist design carries a philosophical argument about what websites should be.
The argument goes something like this: websites are fundamentally documents. They're collections of text and images, structured with code, transmitted over networks. All the polish and animation and carefully crafted user experience—while not necessarily bad—can obscure this fundamental nature. They can make you forget that what you're looking at is, ultimately, just information.
Brutalist design strips away the obscuring layers. It says: here is the content. Here is the structure. Here is what this actually is, without pretence.
This connects to a broader critique of modern web design, which argues that the pursuit of slick user experience has come at a cost. Websites are now bloated with JavaScript, laden with tracking scripts, slow to load and heavy on resources. They're designed to look good in a portfolio rather than to serve the people who actually use them. They prioritise form over function, style over substance.
Brutalist sites, by contrast, tend to be fast. They tend to be accessible. They tend to work on any device, any connection, any browser. By rejecting the bells and whistles, they return to what the web does well: delivering information efficiently.
There's a kind of ethical argument here, though most brutalist designers would probably roll their eyes at phrasing it that way. In a web increasingly dominated by dark patterns, user manipulation, and corporate data extraction, a site that just presents its content honestly feels almost radical.
The Limits of Ugly
None of this means that brutalism is always good, or that it's appropriate for every context. It's not.
A brutalist design for a hospital website would be a disaster. Patients trying to find emergency information don't need to navigate an artistic statement; they need clarity and speed. A brutalist e-commerce site would haemorrhage sales. Most people shopping online are not looking for a challenging aesthetic experience; they're looking to buy something without friction.
Brutalism works best in specific contexts: portfolios, artistic projects, publications, brands that want to signal countercultural credibility. It's a tone, not a universal solution. The mistake would be thinking that just because the polished corporate look has become stale, every website should now look like a punk rock poster.
There's also a risk of brutalism becoming its own kind of cliché. When every hip new startup has a brutalist website, brutalism stops being rebellious and starts being just another trend. This is already happening in some corners of the design world. The aesthetic that emerged to reject templates is being turned into templates.
Such is the fate of all rebellions that succeed.
The Middle Path
What's emerging now, in the most interesting design work, is something more nuanced than pure brutalism. Call it neo-brutalism, or soft brutalism, or just contemporary web design that's learned from the brutalist critique without swallowing it whole.
This approach takes the brutalist emphasis on honesty and functionality and combines it with enough polish to be genuinely usable. Bold typography, but readable. Unconventional layouts, but navigable. Personality, but not at the expense of clarity.
The goal isn't to make websites that are difficult to use. The goal is to make websites that are distinct, memorable, and true to their content. You can do that without making everything look like it was designed by a teenager having a fight with Photoshop.
The best contemporary web design, I'd argue, takes the best of both worlds. The clarity and functionality of the minimalist era, the personality and distinctiveness of the brutalist moment. It rejects the false choice between polish and character, recognising that the best work usually has both.
What This Means for You
If you're not a designer, you might be wondering why any of this matters. Websites look how they look; who cares about the theory behind the aesthetics?
But design shapes experience, whether we notice it or not. The generic corporate web taught us to expect and accept blandness, to equate polish with professionalism and roughness with amateurism. The brutalist movement challenges that equation. It suggests that personality might matter more than perfection, that memorable is better than merely competent, that there's value in work that hasn't been sanded down to nothing.
These aren't just design principles. They're principles that apply to any kind of creative work, any kind of self-presentation, any kind of communication. In a world of AI-generated content and template-driven everything, being distinctive—even rough, even imperfect, even weird—is increasingly valuable.
The brutalist sensibility, stripped of its specific visual language, is simply this: don't hide behind polish. Don't chase trends. Don't be afraid to be strange. Make work that looks like someone actually made it, with hands and intentions and a point of view.
That's not bad advice, whether you're designing a website or doing anything else.
The Concrete Jungle
Back in the real world, Brutalist buildings are experiencing something of a rehabilitation. Structures that were once considered eyesores are now protected landmarks. Photographers seek them out. Architecture tourists make pilgrimages. What was ugly has become, through the alchemy of time and changing taste, beautiful—or at least interesting.
The same will likely happen with brutalist web design. The sites that seem aggressively strange today will be nostalgic artefacts tomorrow. Some other aesthetic will emerge, some new rebellion against whatever brutalism becomes when it calcifies into convention.
Design keeps moving. Trends keep cycling. The only constant is change, and the only certainty is that whatever feels fresh and exciting now will eventually feel stale and dated.
But in the meantime, it's rather wonderful to see the web get weird again. To see designers taking risks, making statements, refusing to be boring. The polished corporate internet was necessary, probably. It taught us things about usability and accessibility that we shouldn't forget.
But we also shouldn't forget how to be interesting. And brutalism, for all its roughness—perhaps because of its roughness—reminds us of that.
The raw concrete has its own kind of beauty.
This website, incidentally, is not brutalist. It's somewhere in the middle—clean but not bland, structured but not boring. At least, that's the intention. Whether I've succeeded is for you to judge.