If you haven’t gone down the rabbit hole of brutalist websites, I suggest you do. They are weird, raw and uncomfortable. Brutalist websites don’t have marketing strategies with perfectly placed call-to-action buttons and easy-to-fill forms. They have animations crawling across the screen and off-kilter color schemes. It’s like when Willy Wonka takes everyone on the psychedelic boat trip,but imagine that boat trip as a website.

Wondering what my images mean?

I’ll give you a little context to my mind if you are curious.

  1. Lox Bagel: Love ‘em. always with pumpernickle.
  2. Dolly Parton: What a goddess. Do I even need to explain.
  3. Fiddle Leaf Fig: I own one and it’s the most tempermental thing in my apartment.
  4. House Hunters International: I get freakishly obsessed over this show. There have been multiple times that I find myself yelling at the tv, “Listen to your wife, Gary, you can’t afford a beach view in Aruba!!!!”
  5. La Croix: I know I’m not unique for loving La Croix.
  6. Podcasts: my real friends.
  7. Gimlets: my favorite drink.
  8. tomato: I love tomato season more than my birthday.
  9. Queen Margot: Period dramas are life to me, and this movie is great (and tragic).
  10. Risotto: In middle school I started making risotto as an after school snack, and I haven’t stopped.

I wanted to take a stab at some of the effects I’ve seen in brutalist web design, such as draggable elements and animated gifs. I achieved the draggable elements through jquery’s draggable feature, along with a simple jquery hack called “touch punch” that allows for the images to be dragged on tablets and smart phones.

I created the animated gifs through photoshop’s timeline tool. Now that I’ve made a few animated gifs, I don’t want to stop (says every internet geek, I bet).

After some painstaking media-queries, to achieve the perfect placement of all the images on laptop, tablet & mobile — I’ve created my own piece of brutalist web design.

Brutalism isn’t for everyone, as evidenced by my failed pitches to design a brutalist website for my clients (clients, It’s okay that you want a pretty, easy-to-use website!). But for me, brutalist web design shows how web design is an art. Web design can be weird and experimental. It can evoke unexpected feelings. So I gave it a shot, and I will continue to use my blog as a platform for me to do my web art.