Somewhere around 2013, the web lost its nerve. Every startup landing page converged on the same hero-gradient, the same small border-radius, the same polite body copy set against pale gray. I was tabbing between three dashboard tools and could not tell which window belonged to which product. The logos were different. Everything else was identical. That winter I rebuilt my personal site with default HTML elements, Times New Roman, and a single electric-blue anchor color.
The Browser Was Always the Designer
The first generation of web designers did not choose their palette. They inherited it. The gray background, the beveled form inputs, the single shade of blue for unvisited links — these were engineering defaults, not mood boards. Brutalist web design recognized that those defaults carried a kind of honesty no polished mockup could replicate. A page that looks like its markup is a page that tells you what it is.