Brutalism has existed for a while as a web design trend. And, Neo-Brutalism (or Neubrutalism) takes over the next website design trend. Is it going to be a new trend? Let’s dive deep into this unique trend.
What is Brutalism?
Brutalism is from the french phrase ‘béton brut,’ meaning raw concrete. It represents the architectural style in the 1950s for institutional buildings characterized by bare concrete, steel, and modular elements. Interestingly, UXUI design adopts this Brutalism as a digital design style over the years. Brutalism emphasizes basic design elements such as bare-bone and un-styled HTML structure, and it adopts the 1990s UI design style, which rarely has a fancy interface design.
Brutalism vs. Minimalism Vs. Neo-Brutalism
Brutalism often refers to the flat design and simple, stripped-down UI elements. The fundamental of Brutalism is showing raw details without fancy design layers, focusing on the simple and bare-bone structure of the design. Minimalism empathizes with minimizing all components and balances the simplicity of the design. Neo-Brutalism moves further and adopts Brutalism's raw design style but adds more movement and unusual components of UXUI design.
Then What is Neo-Brutalism (or Neubrutalism)?
Brutalism became more aggressive and adopted an Anti-design style to break the traditional UXUI design rules. And the revolution of this movement brought the next level of Brutalism; Neo-Brutalism. Neo-Brutalism is a design concept with an unusual background color theme without gradients, modern typography, animation, and ugly elements. Neo-Brutalism refuses the usual components of UXUI design and embraces uncomfortable design elements, and it is more fearless to use distinctive color palettes.
Typography and Color in Neo-Brutalism
One of the critical elements of Neo-Brutalism is a mixture of modern typography and clashing and solid color palette with black color. Designers also use bold and monochromatism, raw text and underlined hyperlinks as elements of Neo-Brutalism design. Common design methods for Neo-Brutalism are the following:
- Ugly design (Clashing colors, Dark outlines)
- Solid Background color without gradients
- Stylish/Modern Typography
- Animated elements
The principal color palette for neo-brutalism is a clashing color combination. Color clashing means that two colors are similar in some aspect but dissimilar in others, so it doesn’t harmonize well. For example, when two colors have discrepancies in hue or brightness, they are clashing.
Future of Neo-Brutalism
blend traditional UXUI design methods. If the entire interface has too much emphasis on each element, it might harm the user experience. But, if we use the Neo-Brutalism design method as a part of UXUI design, it will bring excellent brand power and provide a memorable user experience on the web.
