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web brutalism.

content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8
author: phil bennett <phil@metisio.com>
school: 03 of 08
view-source: encouraged. no minification. no transpilation. no framework.
javascript: 0 bytes.
stylesheet: 14 lines, scoped above.
images: 0.

what it is.

web brutalism is the school of refusal. raw HTML against the corporate web. system fonts, default browser styles, unstyled links, single-column flow.

the position is simple. stop fighting the browser. the browser already knows how to render a paragraph, a heading, a list. when you override these defaults with frameworks and design systems and tailwind classes, you are not designing. you are translating the browser's already-good defaults into something more expensive and less reliable.

web brutalism says: stop. let the browser do it. add a stylesheet only when the browser is wrong. most of the time the browser is not wrong.

how to use.

/unimpeccable:pick-school web-brutalism
/unimpeccable:spawn "a personal page about a project"

before and after: vercel.

vercel.com is the platonic case of "designed by people who would not be caught dead writing CSS by hand." every gradient is engineered. every animation is timed. the home page is a recruiting tool for frontend engineers who want to write more javascript. it is the present-day antagonist of web brutalism.

now the same homepage, in web brutalism. no css block. no gradient text. no images. no rounded corners. no shadow. one stylesheet. it took six lines.

both are vercel. one is a recruiting funnel. the other is a webpage.

rules of the school.

• no webfonts.
• no border-radius.
• no shadows of any kind.
• no transitions, animations, or gradients (not even hard-stop).
• no SVG decoration. no memphis motifs.
• one photograph per page, maximum. untreated.
• file metadata visible: dates, content-type, sometimes file size.
• view-source should be readable. no minified output. no inline comments larger than the content.
• functional things use browser-default <button> and <input>. the OS chrome is fine.
• stylesheet under 30 lines for a real brutalist page.

← back to the index.   web brutalism. school 03 of 08. raw html against the corporate web.