Kickstarter's new design, brutalist or minimalist? (kickstarter.com)
over 5 years ago from Mohd Hazwan, Frontend Guy
over 5 years ago from Mohd Hazwan, Frontend Guy
Why do so many people think that a minimal site design that uses sans serif fonts is brutalist? It's become a buzzword being thrown around by people who don't know what it means.
I wish I could upvote this comment 1200 times.
not enough concrete
That’s far from brutalism.
Minimalist, not brutalist.
I like it. Allows the content to shine. But agree, it isn't brutalist.
Really curious to see the change in the analytics after this redesign. Same with Dropbox. I would strongly guess that in both cases the important numbers have dropped. It feels like lately strong design teams are taking over their companies and make it all about design / art and not about the users.
My main issues with this:
I don't know with which elements are clickable
There is close to no visual hierarchy which makes it hard to distinguish elements/areas
As a user which does not know Kickstarter, I have a hard time guessing what this site is about
i'm just confused why today's date is even on the page.
I don't like this design :(
Neither do I. And the logo is totally illegible. Apart from that, the whole website is unreadable and I have no idea what it's about. : /
logo looks swollen.
Hey man, it's flu season. Maybe they'll be better by springtime.
The logo must be broken or something...
They totally killed their brand identity for the sake of a fashionable trend. Trends are for the moment, brand identity is timeless. Very sad!
Yeah, this doesn't feel like Kickstarter at all. The green they switched to was nice, but the previous one was iconic. It feels like a totally different website now.
Agreed. I have a strong suspicion that they attempted to showcase the creators as more "creative" with this style. Not sure the trade off was worth it.
Perhaps I'm a minority, but I quite like this.
Does it looks like a wireframe to me only?
Same here. It looks like lots of my Axure projects in a first sight.
Noooooooooooooooooooo
I guess "FUN" is not a trend anymore
I wouldn't call this Brutalism, as with everyone else, because it's not. It's more what you'd call 'Authentic Design' (and in a similarly, minimalism / modernism), in a similar vein to how in the 19th century when the world moved towards mechanical presses they began to remove a lot of the superfluous ornaments (In this case, the removal of things like decorative buttons, lots of colour, etc.
The interesting thing is the date feature at the top seems to make it almost resemble a magazine or newspaper page layout. It's a weird bit of skeuomorphism that I didn't think we'd be seeing much more of lol.
Overall I don't mind the site.
Looks like they're trying too hard - to look like they're not trying.
Either way (brutalist or minimalist), it just feels one more project built by designers to designers.
I showed this to 5 of my friends (not involved with IT) in order to check their responses. None of them said something positive. None of them quickly understood what was that about. All of them told me they wouldn't put their credit card in there because it doesn't feel trustworthy.
To me, brutalist web design should look like you barely have a stylesheet.
I'd never mind what the site believes on minimalism as long as the design preserves it's brand theme. I think, Kickstarter failed to has it's seamless brand value in the name of minimalism. Now it is just looks like any other WP blog theme out there.
This ultra minimal style makes it look "unfinished", not sure if I like it. Also, the date at the top reminds me of a newspaper, why is that needed?
I can't go on Kickstarter without thinking about how insane their CSS is. http://cssstats.com/stats?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.kickstarter.com&ua=Browser%20Default
That's probably a weird caching issue with the previous design. If you set the User Agent to something other than "Browser default", you get the current CSS file:
http://cssstats.com/stats?url=http%3A%2F%2Fkickstarter.com&ua=iPhone
I think it lost the energy and usability that came with the old design. At least on the homepage that is. Before, I knew where to look, where to start, what everything meant. Now it feels like everything is on the same level. It lost a bit of hierarchy for me.
I'd love to see Twitter take this approach just to see Trump react to the new UI
It looks like they haven't added a bold variant of their web font so the bold text is being faux-bolded by the browser, e.g. "Bringing creative projects to life." below the date.
Other than that, I really like this!
I think most of this works...but that logo, sorry.
If it weren't for that serif font it'd look just like a wireframe.
It kinds of look like New York Times website redesign from Dribbble. Baffled on the first seen, but it quickly grew on me and I like it now.
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