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equivalent; it therefore shares this preference for “unpolished” solutions, characteristic of an “honest, unpretentious and anti-bourgeois architecture” (Grilo, n.d. para.25).

A rejection of templates and pre-designed formulas. As Sanchez says, “While some designers continued to cling daily to the confines of WordPress, others began to demonstrate against the templates armed with few lines of code and a Basic HTML” (2016, para.2).

All these sites –some from years back, others built more recently– and hundreds more like them, avoid easy to use interfaces based on templates which have been standard practice in the industry for a long time. Instead, they are built on an imperfect HTML coded manually and whose design signals from the graphics of the 90s (Arcement, 2016, para 2).

Yates (2016), in short, turns to adjectives like hard, harsh, rough, uncomfortable, raw, aggressive or even cynical to define not only the aesthetic result of this type of page but also its programming, which usually uses a simple artless frame, with linear styles, a clear lack of optimisation and, at the same time, a complete lack of complexity in order to eschew information overload. Among the most representative examples of this school, he cites, among many others, the popular Craigslists (http://craigslists.com), a website of classified ads, or the random showcase of images Ffffound (http://ffffound.com), who ceased activities in 2017.

Even though the aforementioned features are the closest and most specifically linked to the spirit of architectural brutalism as compared with other similar trends, it seems that in web design the term has evolved towards new parameters, responding to the multiple sources and references that deal with the subject. Thus those manifestations which incorporate “stark colors, bold and unforgiving shapes and layouts, and typography that is often clumsy and oversized” (Bates, 2017, para. 1) have begun to be associated with the paradigm, as proposals which seek to distance themselves from the aesthetics dictated by Google’s Material Design or Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, repetitive and homogenous outlines which permeate a large part of the graphic philosophy of the contemporary web.

It all indicates, therefore, that web-brutalism has been developing its own codes and standards over time in spite of, ironically, arising as a reaction to standardization (Özdegard, 2017). In this way, from the key features offered by numerous authors on this phenomenon –for the most part designers unrelated to the scientific circuit–, some of the new master guidelines by which the trend in brutalist web design can be identified are as follows:

Absolute freedom in creation, defined by rejecting any kind of regulation (grid, hierarchy, order or simplicity). Arcement (2016) uses the posture adopted by several specialists on the complexity of establishing a universal definition for brutalism: for Pascal Deville –one of the founders of the term but not of the movement which, according to Özdegard (2017), was driven by graphic designers from all over the world– the aversion to rules which this style defends makes it difficult to create a stable definition. According to the author, it is absolutely vital to constantly update its definition from the key features that are gradually observed in this web design trend. In the same article, Jake Tobin (one of its main enthusiasts) explains that brutalism does not necessarily have a defined group of aesthetic signifiers but that it is the medium itself which dictates the visual characteristics of the message. In line with Deville & Tobin’s assertions, Gràffica (2016) maintains that this creative freedom and the experimental nature, rather than a specific aesthetic, are what really define web-brutalism. Deville insists on these arguments: