Seth Thompson

Q: Why do you have a Brutalist Website?
A: I wasn't attempting to design a "brutalist" website, but the terminology is somewhat appropriate. I wanted to design a site that embraced the origins of the web platform: with simple semantic markup and less than 100 lines of styling. I also wanted to show that the default building blocks of the web can be used quite easily to create intentional, precise typography without the need for frameworks, libraries, or custom fonts. In some ways, this is a similar approach to Auguste Perret and Le Corbusier's usage of béton brut. The skew of the page and the lack of interactive content is a reaction against slick, hyper-polished, and over-engineered contemporary websites which attempt to feature novel UX, “trendy” design or layout, and rich media-centric content. These sites often take too long to download (due to megabytes of large JavaScript frameworks and libraries, multiple unoptimized webfonts, uncompressed images or video elements, and poor understanding of loading optimizations) and are ultimately difficult to use (because of confusing interaction models, poor information architecture, scroll hijacking/parallax, janky long-running JavaScript, and frequent FOUC). Finally, I wanted my site to look like a xeroxed page of a book because no design tradition has come close to the level of sophistication in typography and layout of print design.



Q: Who designed the website?
A: I did (Seth Thompson). However, I would be remiss to not cite precedent. I am deeply influenced by the work of Jake Dow-Smith, early portfolio design including CMS frameworks like indexhibit.org, and many others who used simple markup long before it was a deliberate design choice. Most web design owes much to the Swiss tradition, Joseph Müller-Brockmann, Experimental Jetset, etc.
Q: Who coded the website?
A: I wrote the markup aside from the CSS reset.
Q: With what kind of editor?
A: I write most of my code in Sublime Text 3. The site is hosted on AWS S3.

http://seththompson.org