Welcome to The Brutalist — A Raw Jekyll Theme

The Brutalist is a Jekyll theme built on three principles: stark contrast, heavy rules, and raw type.

The Newspaper Grid

The home page layout is modeled on a newspaper front page — not a blog feed. There’s a dominant lead story with a two-column excerpt and a secondary sidebar of latest headlines. Below, a CSS grid fills in the rest.

This forces you to write a strong headline and a proper lead paragraph. The theme does the layout work.

Typography

All headlines use Bebas Neue — a condensed, all-caps display font designed for high visual impact at any size. It’s the font tabloids and punk posters use. There’s no weight variation — it IS the bold weight.

Body copy uses Space Grotesk — a geometric grotesque with a technical personality. Combined, they create a tension: newspaper bluntness meets editorial clarity.

The One-Color Rule

There is exactly one accent color: tabloid red (#e8001a).

It appears in:

The reading progress bar at the top
The LATEST and tag kicker stamps
Code block left borders and CODE labels
The “Read Full Story” button hover

Everything else is black, off-white, or gray. The red earns its impact through restraint.

Configuring Your Site

brutalist:
  invert: false        # flip to white-on-black
  rule_weight: "heavy" # border thickness: light | medium | heavy
  uppercase: true      # uppercase heading transform

Start by changing title in _config.yml — it’s used as the masthead typographic headline.