Notes on Brutalism, and Why This Site Looks Like This

People hear brutalist and picture something hostile: grey concrete, hard edges, a parking garage you would not want to be in after dark. The word does the design a disservice. It comes from béton brut — raw concrete — and the whole idea was honesty about materials. Do not clad the structure in marble it does not have. Let the thing be made of what it is made of.

The web has a material too. It is text. Before anything else loads, before a single script runs, a web page is a stream of characters with a structure: headings, paragraphs, links, lists. Most websites spend enormous effort hiding that fact under photography, gradients, and motion. A brutalist site does the opposite. It says: here is the structure, and the structure is the design.

The temptation to decorate

When you remove images — which I have done here, completely and on purpose — you remove the easiest way to make something look expensive.¹ No hero photo of a mountain. No tasteful portrait. No stock illustration of abstract shapes floating in a void. What is left is the hardest and most honest tool in the kit: type.

This is terrifying and clarifying in equal measure. Terrifying because there is nowhere to hide. Clarifying because every decision now has a job. The size of a headline is not a vibe; it is a hierarchy. The space between two paragraphs is not a default; it is a rhythm you chose.

Whitespace is not empty. It is the part of the page that is doing the listening.

Honest does not mean ugly

The lazy version of brutalism is real and everywhere: black Times New Roman on a white background with a blue underlined link, shipped with a smirk. That is a costume, not a philosophy. It mistakes crudeness for honesty, and they are not the same thing.

Honest design still obeys the old disciplines. A modular type scale. A consistent spacing system. A measure — the line length — tuned so your eye can find the next line without effort. Contrast that passes accessibility standards, not because a checklist said so, but because a page nobody can read is the least honest object of all.

The difference between the smirk and the craft is care. You can see it in the small things:

• Headings that line up to an invisible grid you can nonetheless feel.
• Numbers set in a monospace face so columns of them align like a ledger.
• Links that respond to your cursor with a single, deliberate gesture instead of three competing ones.

Why a personal site, of all things

A personal site is the one place on the internet that does not have to perform for an algorithm. There is no feed to win, no engagement to optimize, no A/B test that says the orange button converts two percent better. It is just a person, writing, in a room they built themselves.

So the room should look like a decision. It should feel like walking into a workshop where everything is exactly where it is because someone put it there and meant it. Raw concrete. Visible joints. Nothing pretending to be something it is not.

That is what I wanted here. Not ugliness on purpose — honesty on purpose, which turns out to be much harder, and much more interesting, to get right.