I have been fighting for years to get people used to "90s aesthetics." Then again, I think (bitmap) aliased fonts, bitmap gif patterns, classic bitmap icons (susan kare, early KDE, IRIX, BeOS, Plan9, Mac OS 9, etc.), Netscape, CDE etc. were all incredibly beautiful. I have railed against complexity since as early as I can remember.

It's even more important for web design. Give me simple HTML with a touch of css, and javascript only if it's absolutely necessary. I can think of hardly any websites that I would consider "beautiful" these days for exactly this reason.

http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

http://www.webdirections.org/blog/the-website-obesity-crisis...

PS: I'm not sure I would classify these sites as brutalist; perhaps 'utilitarian' or 'functional' would be better descriptors.

If youth trends are any indication, the 90s are officially a "retro" aesthetic now for those of us that spend too much time on tumblr, 4chan, and all that. While it all isn't classified as "vaporwave", the entire 'windows 95'/purple-pink pastels/tron-grid/gifs is seeping into media. I can pull up some examples if anyone's interested.

A lot of websites we're making nowadays are HTML/CSS with a touch of javascript out of necessity since nobody wants to just use some wordpress template or have it look like every other AngularJS webapp. It might just be the particular sort of sites I stumble upon or my strict adblocking though.

But I'm not sure it could ever be fully 'mainstream' since there's enough people (particularly older) that need big buttons and familiar design to browse the web. But for smaller sites that cater to generally younger people, it could take this direction. Only time will tell!

PS: I agree that it really isn't brutalist, but there really should be a better word to describe this sort of aesthetic.

Oh, that idlewords.com talk is wonderful. And at just under a megabyte thin, a step in the right direction. ;)

... I began by replacing the image carousels with pictures of William Howard Taft, America's greatest president by volume.

You can make something that doesn't require tons of frameworks and loads fast while NOT looking like a relic of the days of Kazaa. The fact that so many developers are too lazy to do so does not mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater and go back to times new roman black-on-white.

As a "developer" of one aforementioned Times black on white sites, I think some people are trying to do this to push the whole spectrum a certain direction.

If you go on designernews you'll see small portfolio sites that require a motherfucking loading screen.

I made my little site (albeit not very portfolio oriented) because I could convey what I wanted to in that way, and I hope to encourage others to reassess what they're actually conveying and what they need to do so effectively. Usually not a loading screen.

I get the utilitarian site viewpoint, but I think there's a certain minimal level of design you can put in that requires very little code, and nothing beyond garden variety CSS. IMHO if you don't go to at least that point it's pure laziness and has nothing to do with what you're trying to convey, but I fully expect other people to disagree about that.

Lazy but also inexperienced. What percentage of developers can set up a site behind Nginx? What percentage behind varnish and Nginx etc. etc.

(I know Nginx can cache things, this is just an example)

No surprising, for the most part it is bad design, and have 0 thing to do with brutalism. And good design doesn't require any framework or even loading a third party font aside from the "websafe" ones.

Yeah but what design principles make the most money?

That's how it all started: http://www.zerobugsandprogramfaster.net/essays/2.html

That depends on what year it is.

Amazon isn't going to win any design awards. Neither is ebay. Then there's the Google home page, which while not quite as free of "design" cruft as it once was, is still pretty minimalist.

All of those sites have been around forever (in Internet time), and they all rake in tons of money, despite their lack of (indeed, willful indifference to) trendy design esthetics.

Someone mentioned drudgereport.com above. That's just plain black text on a white background. It has an Alexa rank of 130.

They rake in tons of money because many users care a lot less about the look and feel than they do about the service/content they provide.

But many is not all. If they were designed to be beautiful as well as functional, they might well see a bump in transactions.

The reason they don't is either deliberate branding (Drudge, I'd guess) or incompetence (eBay), or because it's not obvious the bump in traffic would be worth the expense and time (Amazon.)

And also history. When you've been around as a brand for a decade or more, you don't need shiny.

But it's really not a good plan for a startup to have an ugly site now unless it's making some kind of ironic retro point about itself.

> If they were designed to be beautiful as well as > functional, they might well see a bump in transactions.

More people would visit, or people would just buy more when they were already visiting?

I find it amusing that some of the most popular sites are considered bad designs by people who think they have all the answers to web site design (at least, they're getting involved in this season's look), whereas the sites which apparently demonstrate good design are ugly, less pleasant to navigate, and harder to extract information from.

>If they were designed to be beautiful as well as functional, they might well see a bump in transactions.

They might also see a drop. Existing users might be confused or upset and leave. The site's performance may suffer. Blind people might hate it. Bugs might surface. Tools might fail.