The Neubrutalism or Neo Brutalism UI Design Trend
A design trend that is increasing in popularity especially during 2022 where many eCommerce sites have adopted similar designs. The design trend has its origins from the Brutalistic design trends from the 1950s.
What’s special about Neubrutalism?
Subjectively speaking, I think its appeal comes from the notion of rejecting traditional UI design rules especially in color theory and alignment of elements. It is unique and unorthodox when compared to modern flat designs that we usually see everyday. The visual juxtaposition between modern day design and pre 2000s design strikes a noticeable difference for the younger generation who weren’t around during the pre 2000s era, which makes it a unique ground for a trend to occur.
Key Characteristics:
- Unusual background color theme
- Lack of gradients
- Bold modern and futuristic typography
- Static animations
- Basic shapes
- Hard contrasts
- Dark outlines
- Hard shadows (45 degree shadows that are the same color and opacity as the outline)
- Random and inconsistent layout
Examples
Challenges with the Neubrutalism design
Due to the nature of the Neubrutalistic design, the colors can sometimes be overwhelming for the eyes as the trend strives for high contrast and striking colors.
Colors serve an important purpose to allow us to gather visual information from our surroundings and can often be used to draw the users’ attention to certain parts of the UI. This process is at risk of becoming impeded when high contrast and striking colors are used as backgrounds as well as certain CTAs.
With some examples that I’ve provided, you can see how designers have navigated through the high contrast colors and made the designs actually legible. Needless to say, I think the Neubrutalistic design is still an acquired taste at this point as it has not been widely adopted across different sectors.
I anticipate that the trend would continue to grow in the Arts & Fashion sector because it is often those sectors that break from traditional patterns and innovate on designs first.
All this is just my understanding of the Neubrutalism Design trend. Please reach out if I’ve missed something or have gotten something wrong! As always, thank you for reading and I hope I’ve provided some insightful information!
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