brutalistwebsites.com
2014
Pascal Deville
WEB ERA · 2020S · GLOBAL
Brutalist Web Raw HTML
Brutalist web raw HTML. Default browser styles, monospace and Times serif, no rounded corners, harsh contrast, intentional ugliness, anti-design.
brutalist-webraw-htmlanti-designmonospace
LUT brutalist-web-raw
WHEN TO USE
- Developer tools, open source projects, or technical content where raw utility is valued
- Avant-garde or art-world digital presence where anti-design signals independence
- Satire or commentary about consumer internet culture and corporate web design
- Personal portfolios for designers wanting to signal strong point of view
- Any content targeting design-literate audiences who will appreciate the deliberate anti-convention
- Independent music, zine, or underground cultural content referencing early web culture
WHEN NOT TO USE
- Consumer-facing products where usability and conversion matter more than aesthetic statement
- Luxury or premium brands where the raw aesthetic signals poverty of effort
- Any context where the audience will read the rawness as unfinished rather than intentional
- Health, financial, or legal content where trust requires visual polish
SIGNATURE TECHNIQUES
How the look is made.
The moves a human crew would use to get here. Cue applies them for you, and knowing their names is how you ask for a change.
- 01Default browser font stacks
Times New Roman or serif body text, no custom fonts
- 02Blue underlined hyperlinks as explicit design elements, not hidden hover states
- 03Gray (#c0c0c0 or #808080) or white HTML background with no background imagery
- 04Text set in maximum
contrast black on white with default browser margins
- 05Visible HTML structure
tables used visually, list elements unstyled
- 06Scrolling marquee text or ticker elements referencing early web conventions
- 07Deliberately misaligned or broken
grid layouts that expose the underlying grid
HISTORY & CONTEXT
Where it comes from.
Brutalist Web Raw HTML
Brutalist web design is a deliberate refusal of the norms that have governed web aesthetics since the mid-2000s: the rounded corners, gradient backgrounds, hero images, and card-based layouts that characterize most contemporary websites. Instead, brutalist web draws on the raw, unstyled HTML of the early web and deploys its visual grammar - Times New Roman, blue underlined hyperlinks, gray backgrounds, scrolling text - as an intentional aesthetic statement.
Pascal Deville and the Catalog
The movement was named and cataloged by Pascal Deville, a Swiss art director who launched brutalistwebsites.com in 2014. Deville identified a loose community of designers building sites that used default browser styles, extreme simplicity, or deliberately confrontational layouts. His catalog included sites for artists, musicians, and studios that had independently arrived at similar conclusions about digital decoration.
Deville's definition drew on architectural brutalism's principle of 'as found' - using materials as they are encountered rather than refining them into something palatably beautiful. For the web, 'as found' meant HTML as the browser renders it by default: black text, blue links, Times New Roman, white background.
Key Practitioners
Blake Fall-Conroy's Minimum Wage Machine website (2010) anticipated the aesthetic with its stark economic presentation. Hacker News remains the most-visited site that operates on brutalist principles by default. Bloomberg's 2015 redesign briefly went viral when it launched with unusual starkness. The websites of designers Dexter Sinister (Stuart Bailey and David Reinfurt) and the Occasional Papers publishing collective operated within this space.
Digital Honesty
Brutalist web design makes a philosophical argument parallel to its architectural namesake: digital surfaces should not pretend to be something they are not. The web is text and links. Decoration is a form of dishonesty about the medium. This argument resonates with developers and designers who are frustrated with the homogenizing effect of CSS frameworks and template-driven design tools. The aesthetic also functions as a reaction to the corporate smoothness of Google Material Design and its widespread adoption after 2014.
NOTABLE WORKS
Where you have seen it.
news.ycombinator.com
Paul Graham / Y Combinator (2007-present)
craigslist.org
Craig Newmark (1995-present, essentially unchanged)
Dexter Sinister website
Stuart Bailey and David Reinfurt (2006-present)
Bloomberg.com redesign with starkness
2015
Adam Gault art direction
Hacker News default minimal interface as canonical brutalist reference
Archive.org Wayback Machine as living museum of pre-CSS web aesthetics
THE RECIPE
The exact knobs
the renderer turns.
A Look is not a filter. It is a set of stored decisions the pipeline reads before it makes a single frame, so two videos in the same Look actually match.
SettingValue
GradeColour LUT applied to every frame
brutalist-web-rawTransitionHow one shot becomes the next
hard cuts · 100ms · linearKen BurnsCamera move applied to stills
Static framesTypographyDisplay / body / mono pairing
Courier New · Times New Roman · Courier NewMusic moodWhat the bed under the voice sounds like
noise-electronic · industrial-dronePrompt suffixAppended to every shot prompt in this Look
Brutalist web design raw HTML, default browser styles, monospace and Times serif, no rounded corners, harsh contrast, intentional uglinessPALETTE
Primary
#000000
Secondary
#FFFFFF
Accent
#FF0000
Text/Light
#000000
Text/Dark
#FFFFFF
BG 900
#000000
BG 800
#FFFFFF
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