Instead of brutalist, I'd call it "NASA Revivalist" as it is very reminiscent of the 1970s NASA graphic design style manual[0].
Having personal experience designing in the context of / restoring brutalist architecture (the kind people live and work* in), I submit with gratitude that this tool misses some key aspects of the style:
1. No concrete used in construction, and therefore no concrete smell, aka "eau de mid-century Americana."**
2. No sense of impending arrest by secret police around every corner.
3. Does not require regular pressure washing to avoid looking like a set-piece from a post-apocalyptic horror movie.
* for certain values of "live" and "work"
** sans cigarettes
0 <https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/nasa_graphic...>
1. Interesting fact my datacentre does use concrete.
2. Then your not using the website in America
3. It does use less pressure washing.
I know your comment is being funny, but I will note that brutalist design in websites is a different design theory than in architecture (though, I'm not specifically conforming to any design)
What's interesting is to see the overlap between NASA and MOMA in the simplicity and clarity of design.
I personally refer to my style as "Marketing Brutalism".
Have a goal for the end user (an action or an enlightenment depending on the sites purpose.)
Make it clear and concise.
Good enough is a feast. You just need to appear 51% trustworthy.
If you are IBM in the 80s and you've successfully promulgated the meme "No one ever got fired for choosing IBM" than you are already there.
This is of course assuming a blind exposure, and you've done nothing to get people to tie their identity to your brand, once a persons personality is wrapped in your brand you just have to shovel products in front of their face and their families faces during the holidays.
During a period I flirted with architecture as a career, brutalism can, in very specific applications , work well. But ditto to pressure washing in some applications.
This is super neat!
Here are some of the things I noticed:
My site link of
> Avi Perl's personal site!
Shows as
> Avi Perl's personal site!
On the edit page, there's no link to my homepage where the links are shown. In fact, it wasn't obvious that that's where I needed to visit in order to see my links. It was a guess that brought me to my page.
The confirmation links are going to spam in Gmail.
Perhaps the confirmation page can have a link to redirect me to my edit page, or my homepage?
With a very long bio, on mobile, the last button is floating over your text on the bottom which doesn't look great.
On mobile, the text on the bottom of the page is also a bit off-kilter in its centering.
Idea: If each entry had its own short name, you could also operate as a URL shorter. If I could add "p" as the "short name" for my personal site, lynx.boo/aviperl/p could function as an alternative to tinyurl. Combined with an option to hide the URL from my homepage, I never need those services again. :)
What happens when you need to reclaim a URL for the site that someone has already set up as a user? As the owner of your about page, I guess I'll find out :D https://lynx.boo/about
Tried it out real quick.
The validation on the form page doesn’t require a valid url but when you hit submit the validation fails if the url is incorrect. When you click back to go correct it you can’t fix it because the submit button is still spinning.
Also requiring a title for a url doesn’t seem necessary, just use the domain as the title or the url itself if it’s empty.
Sorry don’t have any other feedback I stopped there.
I want to follow up that the thing I think I'm really proud of is just HOW small the pages are. Of course, this is a stupid simple site but also I don't think it's ugly and even the page with the most Javascript and HTML is about 5kb large.
I spent time teaching in Alaska and it made me really appreciate websites with small footprints.
I was able to submit an edit request for the lynxboo link by guessing the email on record was hello@lynx.boo.
This seems like it could be abused pretty easily. Not necessarily insecure but I could get a lot of spam no?
I love the idea and drive behind your site, and the functionality, but I do have one suggestion that may help.
I suggest toning down the brutalist "look" just from 10 to 9. Two things you can do that will keep the soul of your site and make it more usable:
- add system-matched light and dark mode, that 100% white is very aggressive and bright, too much so and is putting me off using it.
- just bring the white and black in a tiny bit from 100% white and 100% black, make it a slightly softer grey and almost black. Again this is more about making it accessibile to eyeballs. Brutalist doesn't mean unpleasent afterall.
A real "brutalist" website for sharing links would just be a txt file with just a list of links and comments, or an html page without any css/style.
I will use this, thanks.
+1 to the other comment about not needing to name a link (be great if it grabbed the page title or allowed the url only.)
The confirmation went to spam.
Probably this is not the spirit of minimalism (but maybe the spirit of Unix), I would love to be able to augment this with other services: this stays a very minimal link hosting but it offers web hooks and an API key. This means if a link was added, I could self host with something that uses an AI to summarise the for example, or extract a screenshot from the page, or triggers something that adds it to my notes, etc… To me, this would be a great way for the web to be. Rather than companies trying to scale up around link sharing, or be open source and hope people will dive into a codebase.
This being brutalist, you could (optionally?) eliminate the title/url fields altogether.
Just provide a text box which accepts a list of entries where each entry is just "title URL". That's what I expect from this being brutalist.
Notify line number with the link if text box contains invalid url.
Since there's a question mark about brutalism, here's a link or two to read up on. tl;dr Brutalism in graphic design today has two distinct in popular usage meanings:
1. Bare bones. Pure utility, any styling is simply for readability. Craigslist style.
2. Big, garish, bold; sometimes called Nu-brutalism or Sportsbrut.
I should note that each of these has very little, if anything, to do with the 20th century architectural trend, which focused on applying usage of basic shapes and raw materials at a large scale. On the web, the "raw materials" part is the only real connection to the origins of the term, with the first one focused on lofi design with basic tooling, and the second highlighting garish things you can do with basic forms.
Neo-brutalism is another trend to note; think of it as a focus on raw shapes with some niceties added on top to make things more interesting.
Links:
1. https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/01/split-personality-b...
2. https://medium.com/@sepidy/how-can-i-design-in-the-neo-bruta...
At first I thought I read, A minimalist (brutalist?) website for sharing all your "kinks" and I got excited!
Maybe just a small thing, but lynx.boo is a bit of a rough domain to use for a e-business-card sort of thing. That's pretty hard to communicate and easy to misremember. (links? link? What was the tld again?) I honestly didn't even know .boo was a thing.
I love this stuff, ignore all the haters! Just here to show my support! I'll be sure to throw this on my twitter bio as long as it stays up :) https://lynx.boo/chriszhu
would love to see it working without providing an email.
no demo page?
I would start with something like an example usage rather than straight create account
For a site that claims to be minimalist/brutalist and has lynx in its name I was hoping that it would work without JS. But the edit/create page doesn't.
I was excited to see "minimalist" and "brutalist, but you lost me at requiring to enable my javascript, and after that using cloudflare Captcha.
1. Awesome! This comes at a perfect time for me as I literally today let my domain expire which I used to keep my frequently used links:-)
2. What's your monetizion / business plan, or how much free hosting, support, and time can you dedicate to it?
In other words, how much should people assume this'll stick around and be with investing time and habits into?
I am going to let the confirmation link expire. Not sure I will come back to this.
Many others have said things I agree with.
I would make the submit button the higher button and make it a more compelling color.
The very first link I input was immediately erased because the button was red!
Thanks for sharing. I like the minimal design.
I really like how minimal it is. Even the markup is super clean and readable.
I had no trouble going from landing -> working link page. The confirmation email did go to junk mail, though that was already expressed/known. I marked it as not junk in case that counts for anything.
If someone wanted to implement analytics they could do so using the custom css you allow. If they embed say, a custom font pointing to a domain they control they will get the number of views.
My home page on my computer is simply a static HTML page with a table structure and then a link in each box in the table.
It is utterly trivial and totally useful.
More than the early 2000s, it reminds me of early 90s Apple UIs.
For increased brutalism, I'd suggest another color theme, though... needs moar gray.
If I set my own email in someone else's email linx page from lynx.boo/username/edit, can I change others' links? (I haven't tried)
I’m on the novice side, and I think this could be neat! I’d benefit from a demo page (unsolicited feedback, regardless cool work!)
Hi! I fully support such projects, and I am for backward compatibility
good luck and prosperity to your endeavors
Cool! Can we self-host? Open source?
congratulations, it successfully dealt with Zalgo text in the bio, link description, and css fields. https://lynx.boo/zalgo
Do you anticipate a pricing model or feature addition for making links "do follow"?
Seriously needs mono-space to qualify as brutalist.
if you use box-shadow on hover instead of making the bottom and right borders thicker (i.e. `box-shadow: 2px 2px 0px 2px black;`), the list won't shift every time you hover on something
This is lame. I tried using it (used the create page button) with the obvious choice of browser (lynx of course), and got a 403 error saying "Enable JavaScript and cookies to continue". I'll stick with plain html pages, thanks.
Funny, because I am a user of links and lynx browsers... which do not support css.
doh!
It’s great seeing this design evolve in near real-time. Kudos HN.
It rejects the URL
Www.myurl.com
For reasons unknown
Then I have to refresh and then I don’t want to do it again.
Amazing, I finished my link page in just 5 minutes!
is it open source so we can knock the pants off linktree?
Ehhhhhhh they need a demo up before they get an email, even a Firefox relay email. Sorry they lost me already :(
Check out Pinboard https://pinboard.in/tour/ for some great minimalist link UX inspiration.
My favorite 'touch' is the in-situ text replacement for canceling an action.