BrutalPress

A brutalist theme for WordPress

About BrutalPress

Summary

  • Simple formatting to focus on your awesome content.
  • Viewable on all devices.
  • Making simple cool again.

Features

  • Simplicity is elegant. Design should be helpful, not confusing. Providing content without frills allows users to access your content faster and more reliably.
  • Accessibility is elegant. The modern web can be beautiful: especially when you’re accessing it with a top-of-the-line computer over an unlimited high-speed network, with an abled body and mind. Taking a brutalist approach to web design means your content will be accessible by the largest audience, with their diverse devices, connections, preferences, and disabilities.
  • Simplicity is accessible. It can be fun to get lost in a complex website with intricate animations, hidden menus, changing graphics, and endless scroll. Most of us don’t have the luxury of getting lost in a website, even if we had the ability. Designing for the widest audience means foregoing frivolous complexity in favor of high-quality, well-oraganized content.

Getting Started

Keep related content together: Group related content on the same page using the <section> tag and id=”unique-section-name” attribute with hierarchical headers (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>, etc) to organize content.

Reserve the act of clicking for links and forms.

Content should flow linearly: Keep pages to a single column of content, with a logical flow of information, and a navigation bar at the top without obstructing content. This theme has no side bars for this reason.

Static HTML site option: To utilize free hosting (like Neocities!), and to minimize the risk of WordPress vulnerabilities, use WP2Static WordPress plugin, to generate a flat HTML version of your brutalist WordPress site.

Questions, comments, etc.

  • Inspiration for this project came from Brutstrap, which is a pretty fantastic brutalist Bootstrap alternative, and you should definitely check it out.
  • Email hello@jmf.codes with questions or comments. But do keep in mind that this is my first WordPress theme– please be gentle! And if you’re learning WordPress too, I’d love to hear from you. It’s always nice to meet fellow learners.
  • You are free to take this theme and do what you wish with it. And if you’re inclined and able, you’re welcome to buy me an iced tea, but it’s not necessary.