Somewhere along the way, "ugly" became a design flex, and nobody told you when it happened.

Look at the branding around you right now. The startup with clashing colour blocks and oversized type. The website that never bothered to restyle its links. The tech giant that rebuilt its site to look like it forgot to finish loading.

This is brutalism. It trickled into the world of branding and stuck around. But the style didn't start on a screen, or even on a page. It started in concrete.

The word comes from béton brut, French for raw concrete, a phrase associated with architect Le Corbusier. Critic Reyner Banham later sharpened it into "brutalism," and the name stuck.

Brutalist architecture rose out of postwar Europe in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, when cities needed civic buildings, schools and housing fast and cheap. Rather than hide the concrete behind decorative cladding, architects like Alison and Peter Smithson chose to expose it. Structure became the decoration. The building told you exactly how it was made, nothing dressed up, nothing apologised for.

The Barbican Centre in London is probably the most famous UK example, a sprawling slab of raw concrete that still divides opinion. Boston City Hall and Montreal's Habitat 67 sit alongside it as landmarks of the same honest over pretty thinking.

Brutalism in graphic design doesn't have a clean, single origin story. It shares much of its visual toolbox with another movement, but the pairing isn't quite as tidy as "one led to the other."

Swiss Style, also known as the International Typographic Style, and brutalist architecture both took shape in the 1950s, growing out of the same broader modernist, functionalist thinking that also produced Bauhaus. Swiss Style gave design its grid systems, clean sans-serif type, and belief that clarity should win over ornament. Max Bill, a Bauhaus graduate, built the influential Ulm School of Design using cheap, robust materials chosen for their own qualities rather than how they looked dressed up, an approach that runs parallel to what brutalist architects were doing around the same time.

What came much later was the graphic design label itself. "Brutalist" wasn't applied to graphic and web design until largely the 2010s, decades after Swiss Style's toolbox, grids, sans-serif type, stark contrast, had already been established and widely used. Brutalist graphic design picked up those same tools and pushed them somewhere different. Where Swiss Style prizes neutrality and balance, brutalism embraces asymmetry and disruption, using the same materials to unsettle rather than to order.

Brutalism gets mistaken for minimalism more than it should. Minimalism is a curated absence, every bit of whitespace a deliberate choice made in service of sleekness. Brutalism doesn't strip back in that considered way. It refuses to dress things up in the first place, presenting the raw material, the unstyled text, the default link colour, and calling that finished. Minimalism edits. Brutalism exposes.

Brutalist ideas migrated into print through that Swiss and Constructivist lineage, showing up as heavy grids, oversized type and jarring contrast, with a parallel current running through the punk and fanzine culture of the late 1970s, all DIY layouts and photocopied grain.

Digital brutalism had its own second wind from around 2014, when designers tired of glossy, templated web design started building sites that looked deliberately unfinished, a reaction against everything starting to look the same.

Otl Aicher's posters for the 1972 Munich Olympics used bold geometry and unconventional layout to represent each sporting discipline, and they still look startling today. The Beatles' White Album cover, designed by Richard Hamilton, is about as stark as design gets: a blank white sleeve with just the band's name embossed into it. Shepard Fairey's posters for Obama's 2008 campaign leaned on limited colour and blunt typography to cut through a crowded election.

Online, Bloomberg's website and the Drudge Report are regularly cited as brutalist by nature rather than intention, built to move information fast rather than look considered.

Brutalism keeps resurfacing in branding because it solves a problem slick design creates for itself: sameness. When every app and label reaches for the same soft gradients and rounded corners, a page that shouts in oversized type and clashing colour gets noticed simply by refusing to behave. Neo-brutalism, the friendlier descendant now common in app interfaces, proves the aesthetic has legs beyond nostalgia, keeping the boldness while sanding down just enough harshness to stay usable.

Brutalism was never trying to be liked. The concrete towers of the 1960s weren't built to charm anyone, and the graphic design that grew out of them isn't interested in charming anyone either. It exists to be noticed and remembered long after something prettier has faded into the scroll.

Whether that makes it a genuine design philosophy or the latest lap of anti-design nostalgia is probably the wrong question. The buildings are still standing, the posters are still striking, and somewhere right now, another brand is quietly deciding that ugly, done properly, is exactly the point.

Shot of the good stuff.