Show HN: UIDesignDaily – soft launch with 600 open-source designs | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: UIDesignDaily – soft launch with 600 open-source designs

uidesigndaily.com

204 pointsandreigaspar46 comments

Hey, OP here.

My wife got into a daily design challenge in March 2016, and she's been doing design practices every week day for the past 4 years.

I helped her set up this website to share her work and maybe generate some revenue if all goes well.

UIDesignDaily https://uidesigndaily.com

She uploaded the first 600 designs, currently at day 1059. Hoping to catch up with all the uploads for the official launch.

I’ll get back with some stats and numbers about this soft launch if you’re interested.

I'm impressed you've been able to keep up with 1 a day. It is always interesting to see new UI ideas. Seems like all the time I need some UI or layout that I've never seen before. It all boils down to combining many other UI ideas.

Thanks a lot, I'm really glad you found it useful!

Yo the native advertising is super deceptive on this.

I figured it was an ad she made, not an ad ad.

Don't they track that your outbound click performance?

Either way please address it; it's not good for the planet.

Hey thanks for the feedback, we'll address it for the release!

This might be a long shot, but could you send a reference of the type of advertisement you would be comfortable with?

Anything that doesn't directly match the styling of the content is mostly fine~

Even just to get rid of the "Ad" circle image and add "advertisement" in small caps on the top or bottom of the block sounds nice. I think the Ad circle image is the source of deception.

Yep that makes sense. Just tested it locally with "promoted" and it makes a difference. Probably will ditch the first ad on mobile as well. Thanks for the feedback again!

andreigasper, this is really cool and the designs are beautiful. Your wife has amazing willpower to be able to do this for 1059 days. Very inspiring.

Just curious, what do you use to manage the website’s content? Is it some form of a database or just a plain flat json file?

Also do you have plans to convert the designs to re-usable css ? Like the tailwindcss folks, this could be a big money maker if it was made up of easy to use plug and play components.

Hey thanks a lot for the positive vibes, I'm glad you like it.

Since the website isn't finished, most of the content management is API based still. Postman API calls for 90% of stuff. The only administrative UI currently is a form for my wife to be able to upload designs. As far as storing data, the source files and designs are stored on disk, and everything else in a database (including ad images for example).

The tech stack is Typescript, Node, Mongo on Kubernetes.

For the blog I've set up Ghost as a CMS which is pretty cool btw, I would recommend it!

As far as CSS goes, I think you are 100% right and she's working on something similar together with some friends.

The project is called Flow UI (https://flow-ui.com/) I am not associated with it so I don't know more details :)

Thanks for the reply. I’ll checkout flow-ui.com. Put my email down.

My context for asking the question was that I’m building https://boomadmin.com where I’m trying to make it super easy to build easy-to-use admin/content management interface for database backed apps.

Your detailed feedback is very helpful for me.

Interested in how you're managing the content, uploads especially!

Well most things still work through API calls (Postman), but the front-end for the CMS might be ready in the next couple months. Right now is the only administrative UI component is the upload form that lets my wife upload her designs.

The source file content is served from disk, and everything else from the database.

I've been using uimovement.com for this kind of thing but the more design inspiration the better, IMO. I clicked the Payment tag and only got 4 designs back but only 2 pertained to payments. It would be nice to see more as I'm sure there are a lot of SaaS companies looking for design inspiration for capturing payments.

Hey thanks for the feedback! A few hundred files to be uploaded still, so there's a good chance more payment designs are on the way!

Thanks, I'll bookmark this.

As a programmer with no design skills, I maintain a folder of screenshots from various SaaS apps that I find helpful whenever I need inspiration for layouts, information presentation, multi-step interaction breakdowns, widget use, progressive drilling down, etc..

I'm really glad you found it useful! I'm deploying a blog for her too, if you have requests for UI/UX breakdowns let me know. Or you can just jump into the slack channel anytime and say hi!

Know your user. Don’t blindly copy designs.

An advantage of copying designs, for your user, is your user will already be familiar with them. (In contrast to coming up with something original.)

Not if it’s the wrong thing or something they don’t need.

Awesome work. Applaud the effort of collecting these assets. Small note: when I tried browse and click some color palette the popup sometimes just show up. Don't know if that's intentional but I did not expect that.

Thanks a lot, hopefully you'll find it useful! Yeh, that's my genius feature, it is triggering with a delay lol. I think I'll increase the delay or something. Sorry for the inconvenience, I've been told it's pretty frustrating :P

I have to say I totally respect her endurance. She is pretty good too.

The about page encourages people to get in touch. I did, 20 days ago. Maybe its buried in her spam folder?

Hey thanks a lot, yeh she's really something!

That might be so! I'll give her a heads up. Would you like me to give your contact to her?

Yes, please do! My email is in my profile. (Just updated to match the one I wrote from.)

A great open-source resource. To be honest I would appreciate if the project would prefer an open-source IM solution like Matrix, IRC or Mattermost.

Hey, thanks for the encouraging feedback! I never considered that btw, will look into those :)

nice designs, don't like the site. modal popups covering content bottom left, signup pop under my mouse when i tried to download, a bunch of icons and I don't know what any of they mean except the adobe ones. I clicked download and I was astounded that a download dialog popped up and not a newsletter signup. I guess that's coming. obnoxious

Hey thanks for sharing your thoughts. She tried her best... it will get better, just needs some constructive feedback and some work.

This is actually a really good resource! As a (mainly) backend dev that has had to increasingly do more frontend work than I'd be comfortable with, I have to admit I'm rather... design-challenged and more often than not I want to look at something someone with a clue has made to get some ideas about what I can/should do.

Thanks a lot for the feedback, I hope you'll find it useful! A few more hundred files still to be uploaded!

On the license page, the link in "For more information read the Terms of Service." seems dead to me.

Besides that, this looks really nice. Hope it gives some success! Simply as a list of pictures to scroll down and be inspired by it might be really helpful. Thanks for sharing!

Hey thanks for the heads up and the kind words! She will soon release the blog too, maybe the list of pictures could be in the form of blog posts! (it's a bit easier to manage)

Awesome designs! Good job.

Thanks a lot!

Congratulations, looking great!

One thing, IANAL, but it seems like the license page https://uidesigndaily.com/license (linking to 'Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported') says that it is okay to:

* "Not give credit . . ."

* "Distribute, sublicense . . ."

Whereas 'Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported' says:

* Must include copyright

* That you cannot Sublicense

See: https://tldrlegal.com/license/creative-commons-attribution-(...

As IANAL, I don't know how things stand legally when your license page says something, but the License it refers to says something else, but that might be something to look into?

Again great job both of you and especially your wife! :-)

Hey thanks a lot! That's a great point, I'll bring that up to her and forward your thoughts. Which license would you recommend that is more in line with the license page statements?

If credit is not required, looks like a public domain thing. CC0 [1] is one, there are also some other public domain licenses [2].

[1]: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

[2]: https://choosealicense.com/appendix/

Hey thanks a lot for the resources! Choose a license is a life saver man.

Sounds like you give a very permissive way to use your designs, so maybe the MIT license (e.g. used for Rails, see. https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/MIT-LICENSE). But that requires a license and copyright notice, which you do not seem to require. So I am not sure. Maybe someone else can chime in? :-)

Awesome work! Thanks for sharing it! Keep it up :)

Thanks for the kind words, I'll pass on your message :)

I just wanted to give you my first impression as someone who wasted really sure what the title meant. All I knew was that I'm a programmer that's terrible at design I thought this might be useful for me in someway although I wasn't sure exactly what this site was.

Not knowing what "open-source design" meant, I visited the site and clicked the first design. I ended up on a page asking me to pay $60 for something. I closed to tab. I was really confused. Only after reading the comments here did I realize I must have done something wrong.Then I realized the first "design" isn't a design, it was a native ad. It looks like the designs but says ad instead of having a yellow gem. If I had just stumbled across this some other way and had the experience I would have closed the tab and never thought about it again. Sites that trick users into clicking ads are a red flag for me.

Ok, so I clicked another design that had a yellow gem. All it did was give me a blown up image of the thumbnail. I still wanted to know what the open source design actually was. I almost clicked something off to the right thinking it would be a preview or something. Before I did though I realized it was another ad. It wasn't even labeled though like the one on the main page.

The only thing left to do was click "download". I hovered over it to see what kind of file I was downloading. It didn't say since it's a button and not a link. So I clicked it. It was a ".sketch" file. Arggh! I knew that sketch was a Mac App and not open source. I don't have a Mac and I'm not using proprietary software unless I absolutely have to.

I went the the front page again because I realized that I must have missed something. I didn't see that these were sketch downloads. Then I discovered there are multiple formats you could filter by. The front page just happened to have only all Sketch format ones visible at the moment. I guess I was just supposed to know the logo was for Sketch. I assumed the yellow gem meant that it was actually a design and not an ad.

I had a hunch that the rest of the formats were proprietary to so I looked them up (by extension since the names of the apps are not mentioned anywhere, not even as title text on the images like they should be for accessibility). Yep, they where. It was at this point I closed the tab for good. My definition of open source is different from yours. If you can't open an open source file with open source software or if the file format is proprietary it's not open source IMO.

I didn't mean for that to be such a long rant. I'm sure your web site will be useful to a lot of other people. It would be nice if the people it's not useful for could determine that up front. Not knowing all the product logos, it was pretty much impossible for me to determine what your site was for without wasting time clicking around. You did trick me into clicking an so mention accomplished I guess. Your welcome.

Open source design just means you get the source file for the design. You can look under the hood, and see how it was made. Even more than open-source, the designs are also free to use, sell, or distribute in their original format or altered.

Let's draw a parallel with open source software for instance. It just means you see the source, and have access to it. It might be written in a proprietary language, or using proprietary technology. That doesn't make it any less open source. Let's take Java for instance. It is a proprietary programming language, owned by Oracle - yet we have countless open source projects on GitHub written in Java...

I could go on and on about this topic, but there is no reason for that, I don't think it will change your opinion.

All I can say is I'm sorry if you feel tricked in any way, and on the bright side, the site contains open source designs that were made with free to use software as well. (Figma and XD)

Thanks for your feedback, even though we might disagree on certain points I think there were some valuable takeaways in your rant.

Gorgeous work! Such a great blessing & story, thanks for sharing.

Thanks for the kind words and positive vibes. Glad you like it, and I hope it will be useful!

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