Drew Ink The year

Web brutalism

Also called Brutalist web design

A page that shows its own construction: default type, visible links, hard edges, no smoothing, and no attempt to look designed.

Web brutalism: a white page set in Times with nothing smoothed. A black heading, a line of links in system blue and visited purple both showing, a thick black rule, a bordered form holding the browser's own text field, select, two checkboxes with one checked, two radios with one chosen and an outset button, a raw query URL printed in full, and a table of ten faces with hard 3 px black borders giving weights, price, file size and cut date, the last row cut by the bottom of the page.
Web brutalism, a page, Drew Ink. Drawn 2026-09-11.
Web brutalism: a card drawn with the style's own declarations on the ground the style needs.
Web brutalism, the recipe on a card, Drew Ink. Drawn 2026-09-09.
Web brutalism, a breakdown: the page with its own margins ruled in the mark colour, the table boxed, the recipe as declared and as measured on the file beneath, and the page's colours swatched with their shares.
Web brutalism, the breakdown, Drew Ink. Drawn 2026-09-10.

Near it

Neo-brutalism

MinimalismMaximalism

What it looks like

Web brutalism
background: #ffffff;
border: 3px solid #000000;
border-radius: 0;
box-shadow: none;
color: #000000;
font-family: Times, serif;

What it is made of

borderhard, black, square
typethe browser default, or something conspicuously undesigned
coloursystem blue links, unvisited and visited both showing
what the site that codified the term says it is"In its ruggedness and lack of concern to look comfortable or easy, Brutalism can be seen as a reaction by a younger generation to the lightness, optimism, and frivolity of today's web design."brutalistwebsites.com. Read whole, 2026-09-11. 4,525 words of which FOUR lines are prose: the site is a GALLERY, so nearly all of it is the names and links of the sites it collects. Not a truncated pull and not a failed one — a third shape, and a word count says nothing about any of the three. It is one paragraph and it is the paragraph: the term was collected and named here before it was written about anywhere else, so a single sentence from the gallery outranks a long article about the gallery
and the definition is a REACTION rather than a recipenothing in that sentence names a colour, a border, a typeface or a layoutwhich is why the entry's own made_of rows are ours and are measured off our drawing rather than quoted. A style defined by what it is against cannot be specified by its originator, and a record that dressed our specification up as his would be inventing a recipe and attributing it

Where it came from

Named after the architecture, from béton brut, raw concrete. The web sense was crystallised by Pascal Deville's brutalistwebsites.com in 2014.