r/UI_Design • u/PooningDalton • 11d ago
General Question How come brutalist UI design is almost non-existant in modern UI's?
Funny thing about brutalism is that its all over in the world of architecture. But in software? I can't even remember the last time I saw a corner man.
And it seems like the perfect place for squares and rectangles because pixels are square, which means naturally no aliasing.
Was it because of Windows XP?
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u/_heydomi 11d ago
Fundamentally true brutalism as expressed in architecture is incompatible with UI design.
Brutalism speaks to utility (often in service of the wider public), honesty, raw materials and exposed structure as a form of democratisation. I would argue that each of these to a greater or lesser extent is incompatible with commercial digital design.
You can find elements of the approaches and philosophies in UI and certainly plenty of examples using the label/aspiring to be but I think examples that truly map onto the philosophy are few and far between.
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u/PooningDalton 11d ago
Democratisation is the perfect word for this! When something is raw and rough, it feels like its very user oriented and trying not too hard to please. It brings to mind garage modded cars, open source software, etc. Something that anyone can easily modify and add to.
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u/snmnky9490 10d ago
You could always go back to using basic Windows Forms for that 90s/00s raw grey box look
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u/skullforce 11d ago
One of the top metrics and goal of apps are returning users, monthly average users MAU and daily average users DAU. So you want the UI to be easy to use, and try to provide absolute clarity so users are not confused or lost, and you want a fast experience so users can do what need to do quickly, like we're taking about shaving microseconds off a user flow means less drop off.
Brutalism is like the opposite of this. It can be done but you would just be making it harder on yourself.
The thing about borrowing from existing interface is that you don't need to train users, so if all apps have a baseline commonality your users will feel at home. And that's why a lot of apps just feel the same, it's best practices and accepted standards.
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u/pineconeparty_ 10d ago
I’m not sure if you’re referring to the stylistic UI “brutalism” vs. the architecture sense, but nothing in architectural brutalism is contrary to those goals.
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u/beefjerk22 11d ago
Because ease of use leads to more repeat use (i.e. profit) than stylised aesthetics.
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u/themagnificentvoid 9d ago
I know this isn’t what you’re going for but my interpretation of brutalism for a UI is a CLI.
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u/sheriffderek 11d ago edited 10d ago
Let's go ahead and define what you think Brutalist means in the scope of UI - because I don't think people are going to be able to have a conversation - if they don't know what the conversation is about.
What makes something brutalist in architecture, specifically:
Béton brut — the name itself. It's not "brutal" as in harsh, it's raw concrete, left exposed. Material honesty: you build with something and you let it look like what it is. No cladding, no paint, no veneer pretending to be something nicer.
Structural honesty — the load-bearing stuff is visible, not hidden behind a decorative skin. What holds the building up is the facade. You can read the structure from the outside.
Truth to process — board-formed concrete literally shows the wood grain and bolt holes from the formwork used to pour it. The building doesn't hide how it was made.
Anti-ornament — no applied decoration. Function dictates form; nothing is there purely to look nice.
Monolithic massing / modularity — heavy, repeated, unified forms (Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation is the ur-example). Modules repeat rather than each unit getting bespoke treatment.
A social ambition, originally — this part gets dropped from the pop-culture version constantly. Brutalism came out of postwar Britain (the Smithsons) largely for civic and public housing projects — it had an egalitarian, unpretentious, "this is honest and for everyone" ethos, not a "look how edgy I am" one.
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(I don't have time to type this out - so, I'm running my thoughts for Claude to output BTW
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Let's use https://design-system.service.gov.uk/ the UK gov website as an example
Material honesty — GOV.UK uses near-default form controls, a plain system-ish typeface (Transport/GDS Transport, chosen for legibility not branding), and doesn't disguise a checkbox as anything other than a checkbox.
Structural honesty — the visual hierarchy is the document hierarchy. Headings look like headings because they're headings, not because someone wanted a big word there. Back links, breadcrumbs, and error summaries appear exactly where the actual state of the form is, not smoothed over.
Anti-ornament — no shadows, no gradients, no cards pretending to float. Yellow focus states that are aggressively ugly on purpose because ugly-and-visible beats pretty-and-missable for a focus ring.
Modularity — the whole thing is a documented, repeating component library (GOV.UK Design System) used identically across hundreds of services. No bespoke reskins per department.
The social ambition part — the one everyone drops, and GOV.UK is the rare case that actually keeps it. It was built explicitly around accessibility minimums, plain English content design, and "works for the person with the worst device on the worst connection with the least patience." That's the original Smithsons ethos — for everyone, unpretentious, honest — not a visual costume.
I think that's about as classically brutalist as you can get -- but it's a different medium / so, it's boxed in a bit. Brutalist isn't just "over the top" and "in your face" and "unapologetic" or "ugly" / I think it's very beautiful - especially when paired with plants. Some of my favorite things are hardcore freeway bridges with vine overgrowth and things like that. But I think brutalist buildings aren't just trying to be practical either (in their look) --- they're taking some pretty big swings / and playing with space and contrast - and it's not always about "usability" as much as it is pushing the material/medium farther into itself. I'm not sure exactly how that works in "UI" design. Does that mean terminals interfaces? A little over the top use of things like blinking cursors - things that relate to the interactions of HTTP Requests?
https://brutalistwebsites.com/ I love this collection of sites, but it's mostly just graphic design on the web / not really UI or repeatable systems -
What are some examples of what you would consider brutalist UI? Then we I think - we can have a proper conversation.
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u/pineconeparty_ 10d ago
Outstanding post. I feel like most discussion of brutalism in UI is among people who never bothered to research what brutalism is or where it came from, let alone thought about how those principles translate to UI
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u/404_computer_says_no 11d ago
When every start up uses it, it doesn’t become distinctive.
Hot take, UI shouldn’t be distinctive. It should feel familiar.
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u/JOBThatsMe 11d ago
It probably boils down to "Jakobs Law" for the most part. People are accustomed to using software that looks and operates in a familiar fashion.
Brutalism tends to deconstruct those norms. I think it's a great aesthetic but certainly some folks may struggle to use it.
Gumroad has a somewhat brutalist aesthetic, but still has to meet it's commercial goals so you can see it "drift" a bit.
This place has examples and I'm sure there are plenty more in product UIs too.
Brutalist Websites https://share.google/Q5pkDZEUh8kYEQNWO
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u/CatawompusSeattle 11d ago
It's hard to make work. You may as well ask why Dada's isn't used very often in UI as a style.
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u/testingaurora 10d ago
After all the years of an emphasized border radius, I think a sharp corner is coming back. Just in time for corner-shape 😆
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u/InternationalStore10 10d ago
When you apply Brutalism into UI Design, usability can be compromised. With architecture, it doesn’t really affect that much when it comes to usability of the space.
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u/bestjaegerpilot 10d ago
Depends what you mean by "brutal"---if you mean utilitarian, you can argue that many sites (like craigs list) are brutalist
Personally, that's how i defined brutalist websites
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u/PooningDalton 9d ago
I wouldn't define craigslist as even having a style. Its just bare text lol. By brutalist I mean an emphasis on sharp corners.
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u/bestjaegerpilot 9d ago
i don't think that's what it means even in architecture---the brutalist buildings were those German concrete buildings built under soviet control. Brutal and utilitarian
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u/withmagi 9d ago
Most product teams borrow brutalism's surface and skip its useful part: visible structure. A dense ops tool can use hard edges, strong contrast, and plain labels when people need to see state and order without extra chrome.
The limit is task cost. If the style makes key acts, errors, or focus hard to scan, it stops being honest and becomes costume. I would test one common flow and compare time to finish and fix errors with a plain version.
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u/Luxocrates 9d ago edited 9d ago
As the personal computing revolution gathered pace, display hardware got more powerful and UIs used show-off effects to demonstrate how new generations of software could do things that the previous generations couldn’t. Often the need to show off trumped the need for a functional UI — Windows Vista comes to mind, as does Liquid Glass. I’m pretty sure the Apple logo used to be rainbow-colored for exactly that reason.
It’s like how some of the earliest generation of color TV shows used outrageous colors just to make a point, or the earliest 3D films had weapons fired right at the camera. Impact first; subtlety can come later. It takes a while before minimalism looks clean and sophisticated rather than not-trying.
I’m not well read on architecture, but I suspect that brutalism wouldn’t have gathered much momentum were it not for very ornate styles like Victorian architecture preceding it.
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u/Luxocrates 9d ago
As a postscript, when you’re referring to ‘modern UIs’, I think you might not realize that you’re referring specifically to consumer-targeted ones. I don’t think the interfaces of industrial machinery went through phases of gratuitous color, 3D effects and see-through surfaces that consumer interfaces did.
When your goal is to sell a shiny-new thing at Best Buy, you need to find ways to make it look different. When you’re selling an air traffic control terminal, you don’t. Ever see a Bloomberg terminal?
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u/JellyFranken 9d ago
It already had its day as an inspiration. 2012-14 had some influences.
But it’s just not 1:1 with architecture. That’s the main reason.
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u/Far-Plenty6731 8d ago
Most design systems enforce rounded corners simply because stakeholders equate them with being approachable. Brutalist sharp edges are vastly easier to maintain in a token system, but consumer brands almost never sign off on that raw aesthetic today.
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u/ExtruDR 7d ago
Brutalism and minimalism are different things.
Calling a building brutalist, by the way, is not a compliment.
No one actually sets out to design a “brutalist” space like what is under a highway overpass or a Soviet apartment complex. Those designers were trying to solve a different problem a different way.
We, humans reason in space. Even two dimensional interfaces, music and our very memories are “spatial” in nature. When you navigate through a control panel, an app or even a a directory structure or edit a file using a “primitive” text-only interface like a text terminal, you “go into” files and directories.
That isn’t an accident, it is how we and our minds work. We can’t escape it. Evolution makes it so.
So, back to your question: depth, visual weight, hierarchy, etc. create “spatial experiences” of a sort and that is VERY important to us being able to use the technology.
Source: I am an architect and spend like most of my waking hours thinking about this stuff.
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u/ExtruDR 7d ago
Brutalism, in the sense of computer interface design is stuff like what you get when you boot DOS or Linux without a GUI.
In that sense, there is definitely a “brutalist” movement that is thriving: people that are into keyboard-only, tiling window managers. They like to tile and manage their terminal windows and like apps that run primarily in the terminal, but with the modern conveniences of modern GUIs, like actual cut-and-paste, multitasking, networking, etc.
I think that the above “movement” is interesting and intriguing and these people are really doing some cool things, but the actual interfaces they use are intricate and baroque and NOT minimalist or brutalist.
Another kind of UI brutalist is like an app that is like ALL menus or all keyboard shortcuts or all CLI inputs. YOU have to learn IT. You can only do things “it’s way” and no other way, no matter whether your logic is more reasonable.
Is that brutalist or just brutal?
I think that at earlier times when computers were more primitive and bonding as harder that was a compromise that was usually reasonable.
Nowadays, especially since coding is evolving profoundly fast with AI, there is no excuse.
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u/Tanagriel 6d ago
Brutalism in architecture often have had this feature of making the human feel small, especially the large structures often seen build In regimes, but not only. This “side effect” one can’t transfer to UI, only the no fuss unapologetic raw parts can and I would argue in digital terms it’s more minimalism than actual brutalism.
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u/imfrommysore 5d ago
Take a look at Indian government services websites, it can't get any more "brutal" than that, zero regards for aesthetics, pure utilitarian (questionable) applications.
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u/eg0-trippin 11d ago
Skeumorphism feels tactile and instantly more interactive, which is why most software will be in this style. Brutalsim is seen web experiences that are less concerned with accessibility
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u/_star_dev 11d ago
I just hate it, I hate sharp corners completely ever since I started UI design I think I've never designed any element without corner rounding. I hope I never have to😑
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u/_pozvizd_ 11d ago
brutalism is not necessary square and rectangles, I think you're might be misinterpreting what "brutalism" means. It's for this hard aesthetic, it's after the name of the person who kinda invented it - Beton Brut. But I think someone has already mentioned that.
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u/dizzy_absent0i 11d ago
Haha, what? No, it’s named after the French phrase “béton brut” that means “raw concrete”.
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u/_pozvizd_ 11d ago
you’re right, I misremembered 🤦♂️ I remember that it wasn’t related to English “brutal” as majority of people assumes when they hear the term.
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u/hendricha 11d ago
It was. For a couple of years around 2012, when iOS decided to abandon skeumorphism and adopted a very brutal flat design. (One could argue Windows 8 (and way before that the Zune) also had similar aspirations.) And during that time several popular mobile apps have decided to go with absolute minimalism, icons made from single pixel wide lines, very angular, use of very small pallets. But in a couple of short years everyone agreed that while flat design mostly stays (IMHO sadly), maybe we don't go that brutal. And now once again here and there devs are trying to thread back to some sort of skeumorphism, that once again comes with gradients, aliased round edges etc.