Show HN: Neobrutalism.dev – Just added Base UI support and added new color theme

66 points by samke- 2 hours ago on hackernews | 38 comments

ls1911 | 2 hours ago

nice web design !

owencmcgrath | an hour ago

looks great!

elicash | an hour ago

The charts are particularly great.

I will say I'm afraid to use this style because Gemini seems to love it so much and therefore users will make assumptions about how the website was created.

cjs_ac | an hour ago

Unless you're building apps for people who are also in tech, your users won't have any idea what UI styles different LLMs push.

samastur | an hour ago

looks awful (to provide a genuinely felt counter view)
Looks great, thanks for sharing. Do you plan to add Dark Mode and/or Shadcn theming?
Really unfortunate how much I immediately associate this with vibe coded sites. So many models trend to this exact neobrutalist style when any semblance of Swiss design or minimalism is mentioned in the prompt. However, I really do like how the style looks on some sites, like in https://www.not-ship.com/united-nations-map/ which was on HN earlier.

yieldcrv | an hour ago

I associate beige or purple extremely long landing pages with vibe coded

alongside infinite tangentially related features, because it lacks intention but the creator was stuck in a bout of AI psychosis

here, on the other hand, I’m wondering why they would even release this, as it should be a component for more intentional vibe coding. A Claude design template masqueraded as a whole framework

bradly | an hour ago

I enjoy the look of these, but personally I wouldn't have thought to describe them as neobrutalist, so I'm thinking I don't know what it is.

How is brutalism defined in this context? When I think web brutalism I think Craigslist style sites and reduction of superfluous design elements.

netsharc | an hour ago

Yeah, I can't stand these influencer-wannabe web-devs misusing terms.

béton brut means "raw concrete" in French, and in architecture that's what brutalism is. I'd say only sites that look like they use the default style of HTML with no CSS on Netscape 1.x could be called "brutalist"...

E.g. https://stallman.org

IMO the design is more "Windows 3.1 Hot Dog Stand Theme" https://blog.codinghorror.com/a-tribute-to-the-windows-31-ho... combined with MS WordArt...

martythemaniak | an hour ago

Right, hence why it's called "Neo-brutalist" and not "brutalist". It's not just plain un-styled html.

samastur | an hour ago

Neo just means new. It's not an out-of-jail card if it is completely unrelated to the old/real thing.
Neo doesn't mean it can just be a completely different thing, it means its a modern take on the same thing from before but slightly evolved. Neo-Classicism still looks like Classicism. Neo Nazis are still Nazis.

If I create something called Neo-Cuisine, you'd expect the result to be edible. If I see something calling itself "Neo-Brutalist Architecture", I'd expect it to look like Brutalism, or have some hallmark of the style. e.g. raw, but a different material new to the time period).

As far as web design, there's nothing "raw" about 100s of dependencies and animated charts and rounded rects and opinionated fonts and the rest of the this pastiche in "64 components, charts and star shapes for React and Tailwind v4. Built on shadcn/ui and Base UI." This is just Corporate Memphis + dialog aesthetics[0]

[0]: https://invisible-island.net/dialog/

martythemaniak | 45 minutes ago

It's a visual style, yet all your criticisms are about under-the-hood technicalities. The style I use for my personal projects (https://frost-e.com/design-system/) is a single css file, but looks similar. Nothing is stopping you from applying this visual style to plain HTML components.

nzeid | an hour ago

FWIW, from the OP website:

> Neobrutalism is a mix of regular brutalism in web design and more modern typography, illustration, and animation standards. Neobrutalism refuses the usual components of UX-UI design and embraces uncomfortable design elements, and it is more fearless to use distinctive color palettes.

riversflow | 43 minutes ago

nothing about this is neobrutalist by their own standards. There is nothing “uncomfortable” about these standard round flat shapes, and unvibrant 3/4 saturated tones, they aren’t distinct, its called Alegria[1], calling it neobrutalism is a corruption of the meaning of brutalism and comes off as distinctly uncultured.

neobrutalism should have sharp edges, very vibrant saturated colors, and virtually none of these flowery spiral shapes. (neo)brutalism is forcing a square peg in a round hole with a hammer, and leaving it like that on purpose, because the raw swedge is the aethetic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis

martythemaniak | an hour ago

It's a niche and not super-well defined, but definitely existing style, ie: https://neubrutalism.com/

Broadly, it's a move away from flat, low contrast Material-type UIs and also away from the 'gradients and curves' AI-era designs and back into something that's more like the early web.

rawgabbit | an hour ago

I am not a front end dev. But one question I always had is why px and not em? I thought em as a relative distance would be better than hard coding px?
Interesting. I had thought my own web site (https://bradlyfeeley.com) was neo-brutalist, so I was taken back by how different this design was from my own.

Lalabadie | an hour ago

I think your definition is closer. I would instead look at Bell Kiosk as a good example of someone doing the digital equivalent of brutalism

whalesalad | an hour ago

I would call this bauhaus not neobrutalism.

JimBlackwood | 53 minutes ago

“neowhimsical” would be a more accurate description. Definitely not “brutalist”, I’m unsure if the founders of this term ever saw anything brutalist.

twochillin | 16 minutes ago

There's two definitions of brutalist web design. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42027654#42028919

raincole | an hour ago

I just realized this is one more thing destroyed by LLM after em-dashes.

switchbak | an hour ago

This is like the high waisted, mom-pants of browser UI design.

brauhaus | an hour ago

Is a dark mode available? That's the bit I struggle the most with this style.

Svoka | an hour ago

Brutalism? More like 'Back to school' vibes to be honest

accrual | an hour ago

Agree, this would probably be great UI for K-6 level educational apps.

jawngee | an hour ago

trapper keeper-ism

martythemaniak | an hour ago

I love it! I've been using my own styling for my various projects that I call "Soft NeoBrutalism" that's more colourful and lower contrast since I find most neobrutalist styles to be too stark. Sample here: https://frost-e.com/design-system/

Since mine is just a hacky vibe-coded single css file, I might switch to yours with a custom colour scheme.

julianlam | an hour ago

Ah, yes, the Brite Bootswatch skin.

No need to mess around further.

rodolphoarruda | an hour ago

Is there a pure CSS or CSS + JS alternative that does not rely on React?

lioeters | 20 minutes ago

I wish. React + Tailwind as the commonly accepted default is too bad, it sacrifices portability for convenience. It's legacy code in the making, like jQuery and Bootstrap.

bl4kers | 17 minutes ago

First thing I thought. Tying it to React is a shame.
Reminds me of Notion and old Basecamp.

This is a very easy sell for me because everything these days is doing the infuriating gray text on gray background.

mrweasel | 33 minutes ago

Wouldn't web brutalism be using the browsers "native" component, as in don't style <input> elements?

ricardobayes | 29 minutes ago

This is pretty cool however I feel it's inconsistent. Some elements have a drop shadow and some don't (Button vs Button Group).

tolerance | 7 minutes ago

This is actually "Post-Corporate Memphis". Says me.