jekyll-theme-neubrutalism

About

What is Neubrutalism?

Neubrutalism (or Neo‑Brutalism) is a design style characterized by intentionally raw, high‑contrast UI elements. It prioritizes clarity and structure over polish, using visible edges, strong color choices, and unambiguous layout components. The goal isn’t subtlety—it’s transparency: what you see is exactly what the interface is doing.

Core Characteristics

  • 🎨 Bold Saturated Colours: used purposefully to separate content areas
  • 📦 Thick, Explicitly defined borders: 4px minimum, to ensure hiarchy os visually oblious
  • 🔲 Hard (non-gradient) Shadows: For depth without ambiguity.
  • 💪 Strong Typography: Readable, that favors function over ornament
  • ⚡ High Contrast: to keep content legible across environments

This Theme

This Jekyll theme applies neubrutalist principles to GitHub Pages while keeping the implementation straightforward and maintainable. It includes:

  • Custom layouts built on top of, and overriding, the default minima structure
  • Space Grotesk and Space Mono for a clean, technical visual system
  • A pure‑CSS implementation—no external frameworks, no unnecessary dependencies
  • Responsive behavior without introducing layout complexity

“People generally see brutalism as ugly for the sake of being ugly. But they tend to miss that brutalist things are often very beautifully designed to solve a problem which isn’t anything to do with aesthetics.” — Sphism, Reddit discussion on neubrutalism

Why A Neubrutalism jekyll theme?

I originally built this because I thought the style was interesting. Clients didn’t share that opinion, and it wasn’t useful in any customer‑facing context. Recently, though, I’ve been writing a large amount of internal documentation and runbooks, and I needed a personal, stable place to keep everything—something that wouldn’t get lost during org changes, platform moves.ect So I pillaged my original implementation of this theme back and adapted it for my own use.

“Selling these shitty layouts is the real challenge.” — Deleted User, Same Reddit discussion

Get Started

Refer to the Jekyll documentation for details on configuration and templating. To customize colors or spacing, edit assets/css/style.css. The theme is intentionally simple, so modifying it should be straightforward.