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Comment by whytaka | Hacker News Reader

As a UX person, I see good and bad when I see these sorts of websites.

The good I see is that the markup is absolutely minimal, although I'm disappointed that the developer didn't give a unique name to the css in the examples. I see so many developers complain about CSS but time and time again, I see that the problem isn't that CSS is some terrible archaic language, it's that developers create messy markup that forces CSS hacks to correct them. Nevertheless, this website does a great job in not exactly showing the 'What' but the 'How' which leads to my next point.

The bad I see is that unless these effects are edited to match a more complete brand style guide, they just look like gimmicks and will do little to 'delight' any user.

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I do think that is the kind of purpose for these demo/example sites. They represent a basic concept in a visually pleasing way and allow developers / UI / UX people to take them and integrate them into the brand they are working with. For personal projects it's probably easy enough to just grab and go without thinking about it to much.

I agree with you about CSS and markup, so making something like this a utility class/setup could help it integrate well. It is an open source github repo, fork it apply your ideas and request a pull request.

> fork it apply your ideas and request a pull request

exactly! it's open source, so make it your own if you're not satisfied with someone else's way of doing things. very cool demo.

As a graphic designer, I see no problem with this sort of thing. I'm guessing the author imagined these gizmos being used by people who are looking to publish something that isn't completely unstyled but doesn't have enough non-textual communication needs to justify getting someone with the expertise to make a real design, (let alone creating a complete visual identity.) For example, this sort of thing might be useful for someone rolling their own site for an open source python module. In these contexts, I see no problem with decoration for the sake of decoration as long as it doesn't significantly take away from the message.

I especially dislike most of these because they don't actually feel very responsive. The animations are so slow that quickly hovering something looks jarring and waiting for the animation just feels wrong.

I don't mind that. The slower transitions help showcase exactly what the animations are, and anyone should be able to change the css transition from 0.25s to whatever else they'd like it to be.

What browser/hardware did you try them with? I don't have a particularly fast computer and they run really smoothly on both Firefox and Chromium.

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