I can only assume this was posted to HN as ragebait. I think a bunch of these pages look great. I wish my brain could intuitively match typefaces, colours and illustrations in the way some of these pages do, but no, engineer brain go bleep bloop.
But let’s be real: they’re way too marketing-y for the HN crowd. Don’t they know we like 10px text and as few margins as possible? Information density, people!
It’s completely marketing, every page I saw was a landing/home page. A lot were just brochure websites for an agency. Maybe I missed it, but would be interesting to see this similar inspiration focus on application UI/UX design. There’s a handful of apps that I just like using / doing work in / interacting with the service. Eg. notion, airtable, figma, and while not a front end guy I’ve spent a lot if time in FE over the years and some of these apps leave me wondering how they managed to get html/css/js to look and behave this way. It’s gone beyond the web2.0 origin which gmail still feels like. Some of these web apps feel like full blown applications and introduce a lot of rather unique/bespoke functionality
It is clearly a company doesn't want to be lumped together with Typeform, Surveymonkey or Google Forms, so it's positioning itself as a "employee engagement, performance and development tools". They want to sell tooling that is specific to HRs and other people that might have the desire for those specific tools.
I get the desire for boxing things in 10 or 20 neat categories, but companies (and especially those that have a sales team) are often looking to differentiate themselves.
Whether they are able to execute this well remains to be seen, naturally.
10pt font is just bad because there are too many combinations of device/person where it's nearly illegible. It's fine for fine print and redundant captions but you shouldn't go below 11 for paragraphs in most cases.
Also, even if you're an information density nerd you need tactical whitespace that helps you quickly jump to the right text box.
I think it would be improved by focusing on specific elements or patterns. These look pretty but there are deficient elements in some of the designs. With more guidance (the job of the site, but it's too minimalist right now) you can spot the elements which do stand out.
I struggled with what you describe and art/design more generally. I started photography as a tech person and naturally gravitated to being a gear head. Now I still shoot with my ancient Canon EOS 7d and it's much more relaxing. I only got there by doing everything by making hard break from looking at the technical aspects, avoiding certain forums, finding photo walks without gearheads, etc.
With time I started to appreciate other elements of design and be able to put things together without the feelings that existed before. I'm not sure if there is a particular psychological description of this. There is definitely an element of my anxiety at play though.
The 10px and margins get to me too. I'm probably better at articulating my views now with designers that results in productive outcomes. If designers only have the ear of the CEO though it's a lost cause.
I used to tell myself the same, but after years of doing it you slowly build up a set of rules and intuition in your head. Practice, practice, practice.
If you are a designer and think about this all day, you might have reason to take offense. Here's a humorous look from the designer's side: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ
This is indeed an impressive resource if you're compiling a set of examples for a slidedeck on the vacuousness of "design" in corporatised digital marketing.
This is a blast from the past! Right when I read Design is Kinky I was taken back to the days of Chank Fonts, Groove Salad, etc. Thanks for the memories of the good ol' days!
This is nice, but is it all just home pages? Home pages are showpieces, but they're a small part of what I think of when I think of web design. I'd love to see some of the actual UX.
Sorry but this seems like yet another poster like splash page inspiration sites like Dribble, Awwwards, Behance, Httpster, Gsap, Godly.
I've yet to find any sites with actual real world UX examples; actual content, actual text, not miles of scrolling and enormous whitespace, 1 picture and a size 200 font - that's a poster, cool but irrelevant.
If you are doing work for a company you need to put lots actual content on the screen while maintaining elegance, that is the hard part.
Been learning frontend and this is a big issue. The free component libraries still seem very low level, and there’s almost no guidance on going from zero knowledge to something passable.
I suppose this is the TailwindUI value proposition.
Used to be the place for web design inspiration. The granddaddy of all web galleries with a focus on design and styling elements. Really well curated, but picky and exclusive as heck. Then came Dribbble, derived directly from it. Followed by the flood of web galleries, design awards and what not. All stemmed from the Tap.
If anyone has additional recommendations of exceptionally well designed e-commerce sites, please share them. I’m looking to build a collection focused on the segment.
I don't find on-running very usable. I'm trying to filter the list of hiking shoes, and
1. I'm not even presented with filters until after I click a "show filters" button – they default to hiding useful elements just so that the page looks more minimal when initially displayed
2. every time I add a new filter, the page reloads and the filters scroll back up to the top, and I have to scroll down the iframey-type interface on the left to get down to where I was in the list of filters
Mammut doesn't put its filter UI inside of a separate tiny scrolling box at least, though it does annoyingly scroll to the top every time I add another filter. Also, after browsing shoes for a minute, it interrupts me by greying out the screen and popping up some advertisement.
Thanks! That’s exact what I was looking for: great design and usability.
And also cool that on-running is a Solidus store, which is the framework I’m working with.
There's not a lot of examples provided, but the ones there are interesting. Also, why the tracking with Yandex? They might be legit, but it's suspect.
This reminds me of many other gallery sites, but one of the best right now is https://httpster.net/. Lots of inspiring, minimalist, but beautiful websites.
Why are the featured screenshoots still desktop-only?
FFS it's 2024, we're supposed to be thinking mobile-first, and focusing on experiences for the majority of visitors (i.e., mobile), and yet "inspiration" remains "look at these desktop designs"?
When does such irresponsibility become negligence?
I don't think that's fair. We should be going wherever our customers or users are.
If it's mobile—and for most consumer businesses it will be—then design mobile-first. We're an enterprise SaaS company. I tell our designers that we should design responsively, but to design desktop-first, because 90% of our users are using a desktop.
Fair? I don't make the internet. But to answer you directly: then the site should be promoted as *desktop* inspiration.
But it's not just this site, is it? FE developers and FE engineers think mobile-first, and yet the designers' default is still desktop (when it's often the minority, and fading). What could go wrong?
I think most of these are a bit boring. Not terrible by any means, but I think I prefer Godly if you're looking for some inspiration: https://godly.website
While these godly sites are cool, I find them very annoying to read. I think that's just because of my expectations of what a website will look like, and not anything inherently wrong with cool animations
But let’s be real: they’re way too marketing-y for the HN crowd. Don’t they know we like 10px text and as few margins as possible? Information density, people!