Work / 08 · Design system
Brutal UX
A design system that removes every soft-UI hierarchy cue at once, and defends the trade in writing.
- Role
- Design and build
- Year
- 2026
- Status
- Live
- Stack
- One CSS enforcement layer
- Numbers
- 0 radius · 0 shadows · 0 ms easing
- Links
- Live system · Source
- Take · T-05
- Decoration is where hierarchy goes to hide.
Most redesigns dial decoration down a little: a smaller shadow, a tighter radius, one fewer gradient. Brutal UX asks a blunter question: what's actually load-bearing if you remove all of it at once? No rounded corners. No shadows. No gradients. No easing. No custom font.
The bet is that hierarchy doesn't disappear when you strip the decoration. It just moves, from the channel your eye scans automatically to the one you have to read.
What it is
One enforcement layer, applied globally and irreversibly:
- Every soft-UI cue removed at once, not dialed down. Zero border-radius, zero box-shadow, zero transition duration, system monospace only, all forced with
!importantat the root so no component can quietly opt back in. - Hierarchy still exists, it just moved. A five-step type scale (48/32/24/16/13px) and 2-3px black borders carry the entire structure that shadow and rounding used to carry.
- Color is rationed like a budget, not a palette. Red for alerts, green for live data, blue for raw hyperlinks, never decoration, never the only signal a state changed.
The UX thinking
- Removing polish doesn't remove hierarchy, it relocates it. From the pre-attentive visual channel to the semantic one. The system's own validation pass names the trade directly: novices pay a visual-search penalty, experts get near-zero-friction spatial memory.
- Instant feedback is a decision, not a missing feature. Every transition and animation duration is zeroed globally. State changes land in the same frame instead of easing into existence, an anvil dropping, not a soft landing.
- A brutal system still has to pass accessibility, or it's just ugly. The manifesto ships its own amendments: a loud, instant focus ring, uppercase capped at short labels only, and color always paired with text so it's never the sole carrier of meaning.
Most design systems soften over time. This one is the control group. Building the extreme version first makes it obvious which comfort you're actually buying when you add rounding, shadow, or motion back in.
Terry Time is built on it, in cobalt.