[HN Gopher] Godly - Astronomically good web design inspiration
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Godly - Astronomically good web design inspiration
Author : spansoa
Score : 166 points
Date : 2023-08-22 18:33 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (godly.website)
(TXT) w3m dump (godly.website)
| Unai wrote:
| Does anyone have a web design inspiration site that's focused on
| sites that just look good and have a good UI & UX instead of
| collecting the most out there canvas animation thingies? Those
| might look good, but I can't get inspired by something that I
| can't replicate without a team of multidisciplinary people doing
| 3D design, WebGL, etc.
|
| I used to have a number of good ones added to my RSS reader, but
| they have slowly cease to update. I could google for inspiration
| sites like that, but I know google will only give me listicle SEO
| spam.
| Jipazgqmnm wrote:
| RFCs! https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc793.txt
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Those might look good, but I can 't get inspired by something
| that I can't replicate without a team of multidisciplinary
| people doing 3D design, WebGL, etc._
|
| I'm with you. 98% of these lists are worthless for inspiration
| because they're mostly at student portfolio pieces or mock ups.
|
| Show me some good accessible, fast, commercial designs that I
| can be inspired by and learn from, not some design agency's 3D
| spinning radishes blocking the text.
|
| Bonus points if they manage to work in display advertising in a
| tasteful way.
| awb wrote:
| Here are some I like:
|
| https://pixelfika.com/pixels
|
| https://cssline.com/
|
| https://www.siteinspire.com/
| 3abiton wrote:
| What makes them unique?
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| Also
|
| https://minimal.gallery/
|
| (I learned about this here on HN If I recall correctly)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| [flagged]
| Al0neStar wrote:
| Also: https://admiretheweb.com
| r00dY wrote:
| In e-commerce space you might take a look at:
| https://theheadlessclub.com/. It's exactly what you're looking
| for. Quote from about page:
|
| "Most directories tend to put emphasis on shiny and showy
| hyper-animated web experiments. Unfortunately, many of these
| projects fail when criteria like performance, mobile,
| usability, and accessibility are considered. It's hard to find
| one single resource on the internet that would combine both the
| technological excellence and highly polished design in
| ecommerce space. The Headless Club started as an internal
| agency tool to foster ecommerce best-practices across our
| development team. Now we're sharing our findings with you."
|
| Disclaimer: I'm the co-author (with folks from commerce-ui.com
| agency). We'll soon make it not specific to headless but to all
| e-commerce stores.
| gffrd wrote:
| Help: what are "headless e-commerce stores?"
|
| Is that like having an eComm shop built atop Shopify?
| r00dY wrote:
| Headless means that you're using e-commerce platform only
| via API and build your front-end in whatever tech you want
| (next, nuxt, Remix, etc). It's different from a traditional
| approach when e-commerce platform handles front-end (HTML
| templates rendering). In Shopify can do both.
|
| https://www.shopify.com/enterprise/headless-commerce
| reaperducer wrote:
| Funny that headless is now considered "traditional," when
| that was considered standard for a decade and a half.
| Relying on the platform was considered amateur.
| super256 wrote:
| Well, those who now use shopify used to use prestashop,
| magento or shopworn before. Not sure if all of those
| stores were run by amateurs.
| cafeinux wrote:
| "Traditional" is just another way to say "what was once
| the norm", so your comment is a bit pleonastic. Is
| relying on the platform no longer considered amateur? If
| yes, call me old fashioned, because I've never liked
| those platforms...
| mattygee wrote:
| While not exactly what you asked for and instead a single
| article containing a collection of advice, albeit concretely
| illustrated in an arguably useful fashion, I can attest at
| least that I've found this one useful:
|
| https://medium.com/refactoring-ui/7-practical-tips-for-cheat...
| austinwade wrote:
| Hacker News's simple and utilitarian focus is my favorite
| inspiration.
| lijok wrote:
| All of these designs are horrible. They're not good, they're
| clever. These are interactive experiences, not websites. But
| that's all you can and should expect from marketing pages
| nowadays.
|
| A good web design prioritises UX and accessibility, not first
| impressions for the sake of sales. Let your sales team take care
| of the first impressions, and focus on building a usable site
| instead of a clever one.
| z3ncyberpunk wrote:
| [flagged]
| airstrike wrote:
| I feel like, more often than not, people's picks for "great
| design" are really just a massive image and some fancy type
| around it
|
| Sadly I have neither the photography skills, nor the type
| licenses, nor the actual need for a massive hero image in 99 out
| of 100 projects, so thanks but no thanks.
|
| I'll keep digging and banging my head against the screen.
|
| This list is possibly as useful as asking Midjourney for
| inspiration, except half as fun
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Just find something you like and copy it.
|
| Then change little details when you find yourself with a strong
| opinion.
|
| Then over time you can incorporate ideas from your memory as
| well (which are still mostly derivative). Im pretty sure this
| is what everyone is doing.
| rozap wrote:
| Oh the irony when I got a popup asking me to subscribe. It's a no
| from me.
| whalesalad wrote:
| I really miss the old css zen garden style websites. It was such
| a rush to have your site featured on one of those. At one point
| my bud and I were going to revive cssthesis.com but were kinda
| swamped with startup life at the time and couldn't make the time
| for it.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| I agree with basically everything said here in the comments but
| wanted to add... after a certain amount of time a modal window
| popped up telling me to enter my email address to join their
| newsletter. It had no X button indicated anywhere. I thought I
| was trapped until I just tried clicking off of it.
|
| While I like that functionality being available, an X to indicate
| that the thing is not required feels pretty necessary to me. I
| almost just closed the site when I thought it was required.
|
| Overall 3/10 "good webdesign"
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Why do I feel like all of these examples are extremely difficult
| to navigate and just bad for UX reasons?
|
| _cries in early 2010s designs_
|
| Like I don't want one giant page with scrolling-bound effects.
| Just give me the damn content.
| furyofantares wrote:
| Lots of crypto/NFT stuff which matches the maximum-hype aesthetic
| that is being selected for here. I suppose I wouldn't expect
| anything else from "Godly - Astronomically good web design
| inspiration" hosted at godly.website
| neoCrimeLabs wrote:
| What was the criteria used to determine these were good web
| design?
|
| Also, how is a website that only provides links/QR code to the
| mobile app store a good web design?
|
| That is the antithesis of good web design as it literally tells
| all users to not use their web site without providing any
| information what so ever.
| pkkm wrote:
| Given how popular they are, these modern designs must appeal to
| _someone_ , but personally I find them really bad. It's pure form
| over function with the huge text that reduces my 24" monitor to
| the information density of a phone and the annoying fade-ins that
| interfere with quickly skimming the page. This kind of webpage
| makes me immediately suspicious. I find these landing pages much
| better: <https://hypothesis.readthedocs.io/en/latest/>,
| <https://cmocka.org/>, <https://pytorch.org/>.
| mikojan wrote:
| https://cmocka.org is quite the collection of contrast errors
| and botched accessibility properties in only one page.
| https://pytorch.org is not much better. Neither form nor
| function in my personal opinion...
|
| If I am going to be swayed that Obys' Grids[0] is bad, you
| better be comparing it to W3.org[1][2][3] or
| something..................................................
|
| [0]: https://grids.obys.agency/
|
| [1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-method-id/
|
| [2]: https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/combobox/
|
| [3]: https://www.w3.org/news/2023/draft-note-catalan-gap-
| analysis...
| pkkm wrote:
| > contrast errors and botched accessibility properties
|
| Yeah, the white on yellow could be improved, but the page is
| pretty good in ways I care about most: it loads quickly, it
| has decent information density, it gives me all the
| information and links I want right on the landing page, and
| it doesn't use anything that would interfere with skimming,
| such as lazily loaded images or animations.
|
| I do agree that your [2] example is great.
| JakeAl wrote:
| Right there with you. Their focus is on smoke and mirrors, not
| putting content first. If the first thing I have to do to get
| to the content is move your interface or big pictures out of
| the way, you're doing it wrong.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Your argument (and GPs) is valid but it doesn't really belong
| here, as this is a "design inspiration" gallery, as opposed
| to a "content inspiration" or "accessibility" blog or
| whatever you misunderstood this to be.
|
| I got exactly what I expected to see when I clicked on the
| linked website.
| [deleted]
| butz wrote:
| You know what's astronomically bad? The website that tricks you
| into clicking on it by presenting newsletter subscription popup
| and then starting to load all animated videos at once.
| gpderetta wrote:
| Well, lucky you, I only see an endless list of spinners.
| netbioserror wrote:
| Good web design != good marketing design. Once marketers got
| control of UI design, every web interface became an interactive
| motion graphic, which is NOT. GOOD. UI. DESIGN.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| This will be a fun conversation.
|
| I'll start: many of these are catchy, and even well executed.
| Many of them perform very poorly on my Linux VM running on a
| modest Windows host (VM ~6 GB RAM, 2x CPU, i7, no GPU).
|
| That said, godly.website loaded very quickly and seemed to
| perform well.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think there is barely room to hate this type of website. It
| knows what it is.
|
| Another comment described it as a "glossy magazine" vibe, which
| seems perfectly apt. Lots of us bemoan the fact that the
| internet isn't a textbook or newspaper anymore. It is annoying
| when, like, NYT or something like that goes in a silly
| direction, but we're not out here complaining that Mad Magazine
| and the backs of cereal boxes aren't functional.
| avree wrote:
| Goes to show the sad state of web UI design. Most of these sites
| are barely two steps removed from default bootstrap.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Astronomical web design? This looks nothing like Simbad, HEASARC,
| or NED!
| malfist wrote:
| But it is a catalog! Maybe even a new one. But probably not a
| new, general catalog.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| That's a good point. Further deductions for not having an
| acronym!
| rerdavies wrote:
| I intensely dislike websites that use this style. All style, and
| no content. It takes you 3 minutes to get to the bottom of the
| page; and once you do, you realize that you have about five-
| sentences-worth of actual information.
|
| That being said....
|
| The New York Time is regularly running mixedia long-form
| journalism that intersperses scroll-bar-driven media with text.
| I'm not sure how much. Maybe one or two articles a week. The
| mixed media can be quite elaborate: animated graphs, video,
| diagrams with incremental annotation. I'm not entirely sold. But
| I can't help admiring what they're trying to do anyway. My read:
| that they are consciously trying to create a new vocabulary for
| presenting text-based information on the web.
|
| The general style is as follows: four or five paragraphs of text,
| and as you scroll down, you encounter islands of animated media
| that are driven by scrolling. An example: a series of pictures,
| with annotations that appear sequentially explaining what your
| seeing. Or a graph, again with sequentially appearing graphs and
| annotations.
|
| Some articles are more successful than others; but I will
| grudgingly admit that most of the animation sequences are worth
| about 1400 words.
|
| Compare that to the web mockups on that page, where an entire
| website is worth about 36 words.
| [deleted]
| jxf wrote:
| I think these sites look very attractive, but this is a very
| subjective and specific definition of "good". Many of these pages
| do not finish loading in 3 seconds, for example. I'm not sure it
| would be correct to frame these as "astronomically good" web
| design.
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| yea this appears to be biased towards design and ui , maybe not
| even ux on some of the busy ones
| Savely wrote:
| Agree. Most of the presented sites are too dynamic for my
| taste, I don't like when something on a page moves
| purposelessly.
| ben_w wrote:
| The vibe I'm getting is "glossy magazine"... though given I've
| not actually touched a glossy magazine outside of a waiting
| room in about a decade, it's entirely possible I'm out of date.
|
| Glossy isn't my cup of tea.
| asteroidz wrote:
| This has always been my feeling about the well-known
| https://www.awwwards.com/
|
| Would be lying though to say I wasn't inspired by some of the
| sites they showcase.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| These are basically all ads for something. It is like with
| TV-ads they are "glossy" in their own way, trying to catch
| the attention to sell something.
| lotsofpizza wrote:
| That's what I'm noticing as well. The content loads, then the
| content slightly changes once the styling loads and then the
| additional large sized content loads and then the animations
| load. So you're trying to explore the website while everything
| is constantly resizing, populating along with animations
| playing all over the place. Also, there is a lot of scroll bar
| control being taken over. It just feels so limiting to the user
| to scroll, which I don't particularly enjoy about modern web
| design trends. I understand that animations and scroll bar
| triggered events are great for product release pages, but I
| just don't think they're palpable on a home page.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| Why don't they load the CSS first, then HTML, then scripts?
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| "Who cares about performance, if our users cared about
| performance they'd tell us" - PM's everywhere.
| Reptur wrote:
| I may be an old millennial, but wow I do not like the giant text
| and frivolous animations everywhere. It's like we're designing
| bill boards nowadays as standard for the web. Might as well bring
| back marquee tags and those silly 90s website GIFs.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| You know how Times Square was in the past: Giant neon texts
| which flashed on and off, in different colors.
|
| These days Times Square is all about video. Times have changed
| but the purpose is still the same, make you buy something.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| RIP Flash-only Web sites, you were just born too early, we had
| to wait for CSS3 and unsecured AWS buckets to match your
| stunning beauty and butt-clenching security flaws.
| mattygee wrote:
| Ol' Gen-Xer here - Oh, we do remember Flash only sites... I
| remember having to build one or maybe two of them even, of
| course after trying ultimately in vain to explain to the
| client just how bad an idea it was. Though this was still in
| the times _before_ the security issues, before the Adobe
| years.
|
| \<thousand-yard-stare \/\>
| Fauntleroy wrote:
| It's sad to see how many of these projects are web3/crypto/nft
| related. I suppose the plus side here is that some devs/designers
| were able to (hopefully) make a decent paycheck making
| interesting work before the bubble(s) burst.
| r00dY wrote:
| You can design iPhones. Or you can design installation art.
|
| Most of "best websites" directories are for "installation art".
| Not usable, money-making design. It's art for artists.
|
| But to be fair, we developers often do the same thing. We get too
| excited about dev-only things that don't always have much
| business value.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Reminds me of Awwwards and TheFWA.
| alexb_ wrote:
| All of these websites look like cancer to use. HN is peak web
| design. It gives exactly as much information as I need and has
| zero fluff, plus it loads super fast.
| coolliquidcode wrote:
| I really wish W3C never got rid of the <blink> tag. It's such a
| minor UI offender these days.
| logifail wrote:
| > It gives exactly as much information as I need and has zero
| fluff, plus it loads super fast
|
| All new sites I load by default in Firefox with NoScript
| active. If it's blank or useless, I move on.
|
| The side effect is that _an awful lot of sites_ load really
| fast and I rarely have to put up with the "we care about your
| privacy (while hoping to sell you out under the guise of
| legitimate interest)" cookie pop-up BS...
| [deleted]
| BenGuz wrote:
| I've always loved websites with great photographs and videos.
| Other sites feel like over-engineered PowerPoints.
|
| A few of these definitely get it right, but most of the
| animation-heavy ones load slow on my phone.
| isomorphic- wrote:
| Ew, endless infinite scrolling. Individual pages are so much
| better.
| pc86 wrote:
| Probably an unpopular opinion, but honestly I wish MVC-type
| development was still popular. I'm working on a side project
| that doesn't need any of this animation or partial page
| reloads/rerendering, and I'm using .NET 6 MVC. Development is
| so much faster.
| dbingham wrote:
| Quick aside, these are all marketing sites, so if you're looking
| for application UX/UI inspiration (which I was) this is not the
| thing.
|
| A good number of these are aimed at developers, meaning I'm in
| their target market. So I'm going to state my opinion, knowing
| full well that these tactics are super prevalent which means
| presumably they work and I may well be an outlier. But I hope I'm
| not... ...so with that hope in mind...
|
| If you want to market to me (Us?) - don't build this shit.
| Seriously, just don't. If I'm your target market, this isn't
| actually good web design.
|
| Yeah, it's eye catchy, but you're making me dig for what I want
| to know: Does this actually solve my problem? The more marketing
| flash you put on top of that, the more I experience a sneaking
| suspicion that you're all style and no substance.
|
| If you want to sell to me, use good clean UX that is pleasantly
| styled, but not flashy. And get to the point. Show me exactly
| what I need to know as fast as humanly possible, with a minimum
| of distraction and cognitive load. Show me your features. Show me
| your UX. Don't use graphical representations of your UX, show me
| the real thing. Screenshots of actual use cases. Show me how you
| handle the use cases that matter to me, your prospective user.
|
| The more you hide your actual product, and try to distract me
| with fancy flash, the less likely I am to open up a conversation.
| I don't have time for this shit when I'm shopping for dev
| tooling. Make it as easy as humanly possible for me to determine
| whether you solve my problem in the way I need as quickly as
| humanly possible.
|
| Maybe I'm an exception, but personally I think good web design is
| a design that communicates quickly, clearly, and cleanly while
| minimizing cognitive load.
|
| These are not that. Many of them are expressly the opposite of
| that.
|
| Edit: For those of you saying that sales are targeting managers
| not devs... uh... well... uh... I spent the last 5 years as
| DevOps/SRE Manager/Director so... uh... some of us keep our dev
| sensibilities I guess?
| no_wizard wrote:
| The reality is in most cases, the sales of developer focused
| tools or services goes to management, not the devs themselves.
|
| I'm certain due to human psychology, that the more "polished" a
| site looks, it translates into more leads
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Nah, the reality is that most developer tools are B2C in
| disguise (with B2B pricing), and that in fact these polished
| marketing sites are perfect for the junior developers and PMs
| at large orgs who actually adopt free trials of things.
|
| From your parent:
|
| > Does this actually solve my problem? The more marketing
| flash you put on top of that, the more I experience a
| sneaking suspicion that you're all style and no substance.
|
| This kind of person doesn't pay for stuff or asks too many
| questions. "CTOs" are the worst customers. They are always
| nickel and diming, willing to go through immense grief to
| "just" "use" "open source" and squeeze free from everywhere.
| This isn't bad, it's aligned with successful businesses. I'm
| saying that the people who pay for stuff are lazy, too, in a
| good way.
| freedomben wrote:
| There are dozens of us (Arrested Development reference)!
|
| Seriously though I think we are pretty rare for wanting to cut
| through the BS. I've talked with a lot of people about this and
| while many will agree with me, when they actually see the
| results they don't like it as much as the flashy. It's
| disheartening.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| They are not targeting developers. They are targeting managers
| who can get a promotion based on adding the shiny new thing in
| the company.
|
| Having said that, I recently enjoyed Val.Town's homepage [1].
| It manages to keep things fun while showing me what I can
| actually do with it.
|
| [1] https://www.val.town/
| dbingham wrote:
| Well, I spent the last 5 years as a manager. I guess I just
| kept my dev sensibilities.
|
| Yeah, I like Val's. That's how you do it :)
| reaperducer wrote:
| _The more marketing flash you put on top of that, the more I
| experience a sneaking suspicion that you 're all style and no
| substance._
|
| The second site featured is promoting "Become a 10x designer!"
|
| That tells you everything you need to know about how
| substantive this list is.
| pmcp wrote:
| A big proportion of visitors will never see these sites at their
| astronomical best, as they will visit it with their phone.
|
| Sites with animations and crazy stuff happening on desktop, but
| then show a small subset of that design on mobile are like ad
| campaigns made for Cannes: fun for the industry, but misses the
| mark in terms of market value.
| rogerthis wrote:
| An example of using "God" in vain.
| HungSu wrote:
| I find godly.website a helpful resource, but I also agree too
| many of these are design studios and are of no interest to me.
| Even if you set the filter to web UI, it tends to showcase the
| sales page and not the UI.
|
| Mobbin is probably more useful to most people:
|
| https://mobbin.com/browse/ios/apps
| st3ve445678 wrote:
| So much motion going on with these sites... I actually find most
| of these to pretty bad, just flashy. Great websites are fast,
| clean, organized, give me what I want with minimal fuss and look
| great at the same time.
| codemonkey-zeta wrote:
| Meta comment, but godly.website itself is a very well-executed
| web app. Super snappy site here.
| stonogo wrote:
| The only conclusion I can draw is that "astronomically good web
| design" primarily concerns itself with ensuring that no more than
| eight words can appear onscreen simultaneously.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Can you make it extra trash on mobile? You're hired!
| d-lisp wrote:
| Hot take : This is so "too much design" that we cannot even
| perceive content through it. It feels like "astronomically good"
| web design is about 72pt centered Helvetica and lazy-loading type
| of animations showing colorful picture and throwing some catch-
| phrases there and there.
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