Algorithmic Experiments in the Design of Brutalist Web Pages

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Keywords: Algorithmic Design, Data-Driven Design, Generative Design, Web Design, Web Development.

Nowadays, Algorithmic Graphic Design processes are increasingly explored to generate generative and/or data-driven artefacts that allow the exploration of new visual and communication concepts, especially in digital media. These approaches have an urge potential in Web Design since there is an increase in the quantity of knowledge and resources available online as well as the development of tools that allow parametric customisation of web pages. This way, we experiment with an algorithmic approach to create a system that generates web pages.

This system gathers data from the Wikipedia API to populate the page with content. Next, the system analyses the content using a Natural Language Understanding classifier and lexicon-based approaches. This analysis recognises, in the content, a series of information such as sentiments, emotions, colours, HTML tags count and their frequency. After, the system generates the web page’s styles taking into consideration the previous analysis. Finally, it applies those styles and renders the web page. The users of the system may change the displayed content as well as fine-tune the visual characteristic of the generated outputs, in a parametric way, according to their desires and tastes.

Although conceptually and visually the outputs are Brutalism Websites, this approach effortless can be modified to generate outputs taking into consideration other visual and conceptual styles. This way, our experiments present how artificial intelligence approaches may be impactful in the future of Web Design. One future when the systems understand whom they may manipulate their information and present to their to users. Is this good or bad?