Prompt for some designer fun:
Create a social media site using brutalist design style.
Pardon the nerd talk, but first we have to establish what brutalist design is. The term comes from the French béton brut or “raw concrete,” and it feels accurate when you see it in the wild. The style is more well known in architecture and interior design, but for graphics I would define it as grungy, punk aesthetic with stark contrast and total disregard for conventionality.
Which makes for a fantastic design experiment because great interfaces rely on typical behaviors and well-known aesthetics to guide the user.
The Problem
Social media has become a lot of things, but for this project, I wanted to take the direction of community centered around one interest, in this case, makeup. How could I design a social media site that encompassed a badass style for everything from everyday foundation to experimental fashion?
The Solution
Allow for already-made tutorials and artists to showcase their feeds, videos and content in a concentrated, filterable feed.
The Users
For simplicity of this project, I kept to two personas, both on the viewing side, not on the content creation side.
The differing interests created the roadmap for the site. For the first iteration of a sitemap, I settled on categories based off of similar sites and intuitive mapping. Incorporating the user personas and interests lead to a broad level of desired user options and a number of top-level categories that were more specific.
Wireframes
Mockups
Takeaways
Despite this being a personal project and despite my excitement to try an approach for something a client is unlikely to come to me to create, I deeply enjoyed this experiment.
However for creating true brutalism, I think it still follows too much of the conventional in it's execution.
If I were to take this on again, I would create an immersive app, not a responsive website (it's my prompt and I'll change what I want to!). I would simplify the project to one set goal and start with one persona. And then I would push the typography, layout and CTA designs to their breaking points.
The look and feel is exciting, but the foundational experience is still corporate and allows for accessibility and intuitive navigation.
