Opening the vault…
Public vault · every note in the open
3 references, 6 human-written steal-notes. Every entry answers: where is it from, what family is it, and what would you steal?
Raw HTML energy: system fonts, hard borders, default-blue links, no smoothing. Personality over polish — the anti-template stance as an aesthetic.
Brutalist / Indie · full website · via Httpster
Steal · texture/material
A wiki any faculty member can edit — chaos as institutional honesty. The 'undesigned' surface signals intellectual confidence.
Steal · copywriting
Default-blue underlined links everywhere: legibility of intent over brand cohesion.
Fonts: Times New Roman, Arial
private-reference-only
View original ↗Brutalist / Indie · full website · via Httpster
Steal · copywriting
'HTML is a material' — reframing markup as craft medium. Manifesto tone with zero jargon.
Steal · component pattern
Bare <ul> of member sites, no cards, no thumbnails — the list as an aesthetic object.
Fonts: system-ui, monospace
private-reference-only
View original ↗Brutalist / Indie · product UI flow · via Are.na
Steal · component pattern
Blocks and channels: one primitive, one container, infinitely composable. UI disappears behind the content it holds.
Steal · grid/layout
Uniform square-ish blocks in a strict grid make wildly heterogeneous content look calm — the grid does the curation.
Fonts: Arial, Courier
private-reference-only
View original ↗Provenance & takedown
Every reference here links out to its original, and all referenced work belongs to its creators. What this vault adds — and what it is for — is the human-written commentary: the steal-notes are the content, not the pixels. Study use only.
Made something shown here and want it removed? Email util.wills@gmail.com with the entry title or a link to this page — it comes down promptly, no questions asked.
Fork this vault
Take the whole thing — references, steal-notes, provenance — and make it your starting point. Every steal-note here was written by a human. That is the point.
npx trova init --family brutalist