Woah! I love this retro-inspired type of design. It feels so fun and appealing, as if geocities was reincarnated. I wouldn't even bat an eye at the $50 lifetime hosting option. I've been watching this new trend away from "clean" UI for a while, and see so much potential for a new wave of quirky services and digital gardens on the internet away from FAANG walled gardens.
To that end, here's some cool libraries and resources to get you started. What's awesome is that since we are in 2021 this design language can be married with the power of modern web frameworks to make something extraordinary.
This has been trendy for a few years now. It’s not quite “brutalist” because the nostalgic aspect references design that certainly was state of the art for its time. But it has brutalist artistic instincts.
I don’t think more modern/clean designs have to be devoid of fun/rebelliousness or lack character (I’m working on a site that IMO intersects both, it’s very much a WIP but feel free to check out [my handle].github.io if you want to see it in its infancy). But it certainly does tend to hew toward the easy.
The only thing I disagree with in your comment is that it necessarily has character. At a certain point the retro design trend will be so commonplace that it’s also hewing easy and a fairly straight shot from “I want brand to be fun”. I hope it doesn’t reach that point though, because I quite like being surprised by the occasional 90s-style graphics.
I really enjoyed the comparison with brutalism here. One of the goals of brutalism was to show off how large public spaces could be constructed for and by the masses out of basic materials. Really fits in with the intent of the lined project!
This was sorta the intent of both the compare and contrast! The big difference with the retro computer graphics revival is that computing in the 90s had a long way to go before being for & by everyone. I don’t think the modern/clean design sensibilities are tied to that though, Myspace was really the inflection point and definitely deserved the brutalist label.
My web app was rocking squared off design circa 2014. In 2018 we hired a designer and the first order of business was to round all the things. I hated it! But, our users loved it. Strange world.
This reminds me a bit of https://carrd.co, though less featureful and about the same pricing. It's interesting to see this resurgence of "microsite" builders.
Maybe I'm missing something here.. the interface is way out there, yet the precooked themes are all pretty much in line with current web design trends. Based on the homepage I was expecting to build a crazy Win95 style website
The main thing is people can design their own site in the editor. Most site builders that let you do this are usually too complicated (Webflow), and the others lack customisability (Squarespace).
It doesn't make sense to offer only brutalist themes, but users are given the tools to do so.
Some people have made some cool, weird-looking sites already whilst others have built more clean ones.
Great UI. Out of curiosity, does a user's website have to be hosted at straw.page, or can they take the generated website and host it on any static website host?
To that end, here's some cool libraries and resources to get you started. What's awesome is that since we are in 2021 this design language can be married with the power of modern web frameworks to make something extraordinary.
https://thesephist.github.io/blocks.css/
https://jdan.github.io/98.css/
https://www.reddit.com/r/DigitalGardens/