@gaditb well, i think it is an open question what the materials of a website are, but the practice of web design is a practice of typing characters into a terminal/text editor/IDE. so i think there is a fair argument that a brutalist design is one which foregrounds the typewritten nature of the characters.

perhaps the extreme end along this vein are those websites which use CSS to display their markup inline with their content, so a rendered title begins with <h1> and ends with </h1>. but then there is an open question whether tags are materials or embellishments. it is not as though “paint” is not a material, but brutalist architecture still used unpainted concrete. this is why i am calling the second option romanticism, because if you allow colour and styling so long as the underlying structure is apparent, i think you are still allowing many things brutalism eschewed.

maybe brutalist web design is a web of plaintext documents? gopher protocol? probably it has as much to do with document structure as technologies employed (after all, technologies are materials but design is what you do with them)—no menus, lots of links pages…

@gaditb from Wikipedia:

« Stylistically, brutalism is a strict, modernistic design language that has been said to be a reaction to the architecture of the 1940s, much of which was characterised by a retrospective nostalgia. Peter Smithson believed that the core of brutalism was a reverence for materials, expressed honestly, stating "Brutalism is not concerned with the material as such but rather the quality of material", and "the seeing of materials for what they were: the woodness of the wood; the sandiness of sand." »

so i would argue that Web Brutalism, then, is (1) not driven by nostalgia for a bygone era but fully embracing modern technologies, tools, and design languages, but to its own ends, and (2) very interested in foregrounding the textiness (as a sequence of Unicode grapheme clusters encoded as bytes) of text, the screenness of the computer screen, the mousiness of the mouse, the linkiness of the link, in a way which does not make them seem like something they are not (i·e, rejecting skeuomorphism and attempts to replicate the experience of printed materials) but cherishes what they are (digital elements comprised of pixels and interacted with via the mediation of a browser)

@Lady Hmm.

Are the materials we're considering the materials used for construction, as experienced by the builder/writer, or the materials and their properties that give the reason why X or Y is selected for use, which inform the physics/rendering as-experienced?

The materials I was imagining as far as websites were concerned was also (possibly primarily) the treeiness of the parse tree, the standardness and semanticness of the tag-in-the-abstract.

@Lady I might be misunderstanding brutalism, tho.

(Also, the <tag> I was attempting to refer to was the abstract recognition -- "okay, looking at this page obviously that should be a <nav>, that should be an <audio>, that should be a <h#>" and being accurate in that. Not that the actual "<>" are rendered.
Was the intention -- don't know if that came across to everyone/anyone answering the poll.)

@gaditb (i understood your intention dw)

@gaditb well, the thing here is that text is linear. if you want to get into the tree-ness of the HTML tree, really, you have to be breaking up the linearity of the text. otherwise, text on the internet gives the illusion that you are looking at something no different than an RTF document (which is not tree-based) or a PDF document (which is not tree-based) or…

and maybe that is what web brutalism is, but i think that requires going a lot further than just styling some elements consistently with readers intuitions. you have to ask “what makes the materiality of the webpage different from that of a LaTeX document?” and bare that open. meaning, if a webpage looks not all that different from a PDF generated with LaTeX, it is probably not brutalist?

@Lady @gaditb I think I'd read "materials" as "constituent parts": It being obvious where one block element ends and another begins (if you look for it) seems like the level I would expect for "brutalist website design". Text is how HTML elements are built and sand and lime are how cement is built, but I wouldn't say that brutalist design centers either ingredient into the parts you see. (Yes you also see text on most web pages, but that's not always a strict requirement of the design.)