NL Architects (KK)
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Q: Why do you have a Brutalist Website?
A: Haha, I'm delighted to hear that we have a Brutalist website! We didn’t now such thing exists… in architecture Brutalism is the movement that explored the possibilities of raw concrete. Fortunately after decades of demolition and destruction Brutalism is now appreciated again. A remarkable example is the apartment building Kleiburg in Amsterdam that was recently rescued from the wrecking ball. It is perhaps unexpected for an office that features .NL (the Dutch internet extension) in our logo but we were incredibly late in launching a serious website. We were terrified of the hermetic platforms of the early days; they gave us a sense of claustrophobia. The proto-version of our site was a link to a webcam in our office: so not the obvious pompous self inflating 'brochure' about our superior skills, but the ‘real’ thing: you could just see what we were actually doing, was the idea... A bit later we created a kind of portal with a bunch of clickable links to that would allow us to make specific sub-sites, that all could feature a specific look and feel, tailor made for the subject. An informal pile of websites that did not require coherence. This opened the windows for us... gave us the freedom we were looking for.

The remnants of this early idea are still active on our current site and can be found under the ‘misc’ button. One of the buttons is ‘UNDER CONSTRUCTION’ which leads to an overview of the projects that are currently being built. We thought this mix up would be appropriate, but when it was still on our cover page it resulted in a very high bounce rate… people assumed there was nothing yet to see… "As little design as possible" Dieter Rams proclaimed. We live by that. Design should not distract, but support the content. (This does not imply that abundant design is always ‘illicit’). We love archetypes. We use Arial and the most basic ‘skins’, for instance ‘Kubric’ for our wordpress BLOG. For the ‘Projects’ chapter I prepare the files in PowerPoint, standard 4:3 aspect ratio. Raw and Concrete.
Q: Who designed the website?
A: NL Architects together with Density21.5 / Jasper den Hertog
Q: Who coded the website?
A: Density21.5 / Jasper den Hertog
Q: With what kind of editor?
A: vim
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http://nlarchitects.nl