The Whimsical Website Club | Hacker News Reader

The Whimsical Website Club

whimsical.club

279 pointsmxbck33 comments

LOL at the button after the submission form. I submitted https://simonsarris.com because of my ridiculous background (a town that builds with CSS animations, and birds that appear to have no set path done with pure CSS).

The logic behind the little birds: they are DIVs with CSS animated on a cubic path up-and-down, while their ::after is getting animated on a different cubic path left-to-right. The result of 2 separate axis animations: They do a loose figure-8 path that's different each pass.

That CSS code is here: https://github.com/simonsarris/site-simonsarris/blob/master/...

I am currently trying to make my site background considerably more ridiculous by re-implementing in canvas, with lots of interaction and a night/day sequence, and custom buildings. The rebuild so far is open source here: https://simonsarris.github.io/simeville/

Click the button to build a town. Drag the sun down to see night time (and the constellations). I need to spend a lot of time working on the art, but I'm not a very good artist yet.

That's lovely, and the rebuild is awesome.

I had to spam the website to find out, but if you want to try without spamming, just go to this URL directly:

https://whimsical.club/join/submitted

This feels like I got off a well-travelled freeway and got on the beautiful and quirky back-roads, seeing a whole different side of the web.

It's also making me realize how dependent† I've become on search engines. Don't get me wrong, they are great at what they do, but seeing these curated list of sites definitely reminds me of the late 90's where directories were still a thing.

†: ie. lazy.

Max's previous post [1] touches on the some of the ideas from the early 90s internet that we're starting to see return today.

I'm personally most excited to to watch the return and rise of niche self-run communities that were greatly supressed during the early days of social media.

[1] https://mxb.dev/blog/the-return-of-the-90s-web/

I love this so much.

Software has gotten so boring. OSX used to have a ton of fun weird little things (like the poof when you removed an app) that have all been removed. Same with Google. I miss it.

One of our company values is "Err on the side of whimsy," and it's my far my favorite one... life's too short to not make things a bit weird fun and interesting.

(Also, for people who haven't seen it, also check out https://littlebigdetails.com/ )

Care to share your company then? Or your products/website that I can take a look at?

Company is ReadMe.com :) Here's our handbook with the values: https://readme.com/handbook

Nice! I see the whimsical part indeed. I like the owl character (especially its prevalence in https://blog.readme.com/)! Has way more personality than [Alegria](https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/dont-worry-these-gangley-armed-...).

Tell your designers for me to bank on that visual language and stay away from "corporate clip-art". <smallrant>It's funny to me how even start-ups (who claim "personal touch" as an edge in their service) utilize the blandness of Alegria.</smallrant>

I'm the designer, so I hear ya! Definitely agree... we worked hard to make sure Owlbert only pops up rarely. He's not on the homepage (other than a few easter eggs), and barely in the product. He's mostly for swag and the blog!

Doing a shameless plug, but if you like this, check my project https://www.waveguide.io/patterns/all | I document a bunch of software (web, mobile and sometime real life) user experience patterns.

I also document a bunch of other stuff like screenshots of different websites and try to classify them in a meaningful way.

Still a long way to go for this to become what I want it to be but it might be helpful for someone here. Here is the landing page to understand a little bit better what I'm trying to do with this: https://www.waveguide.io/

I didn't have a chance to dive too deeply but I just signed up.

Thanks for the work and sharing!!

Thanks! Really appreciate the support.

Whilst the work you're doing is commendable, it feels like the complete opposite of the whimsical website.

The whimsical website club aims to "showcase how a more personal web could look", and highlights the weird, unique, and non-traditional things about these creative's websites. The whole idea is about moving away from corporate boringness.

Waveguide, meanwhile, seems to be covering very 'corporate' UX patterns that could (and should?) be used in the business world.

Those things seem completely different and at odds with each other, so I'm not really sure why you think waveguide is related (other than wanting to self-promote for it's own sake?).

I have fun ones too: https://www.waveguide.io/patterns/web/entry/thanos-snap

Yeah. Self-promoting but I definitely think is related because it documents this little details that increase the delightfulness of the website.

Awesome! Sent you an email.

Fun and inspiring.

I once made a site devoted to McGriddle fan fiction that has a cool McGriddle gif, and each layer of the McGriddle image hides a surprise. http://blueskiesabove.us/mcgriddle/ Not sure if that's whimsical or...

You might also like the Weird Wide Webring

https://weirdwidewebring.net

My friend Damien's homepage [1] should really go on this list. It embeds a Nethack game on the home page.

[1] Check it out: https://desfontain.es/

I nominate @benjojo's personal site which spawns a full on interactive linux VM running in the background for each visitor. https://benjojo.co.uk/

honestly it's quite exciting when things like this pop up in my news feed. I could spend a couple of hours binge clicking links and discovering new sites.

My favorite is https://www.11ty.dev/ - not the first time I've seen it but good to be reminded of it!

Here's the twitter thread about their logo: https://twitter.com/jameswillweb/status/999052022497316865

11ty is a great little static site generator. I just started playing with it. Fun to use and seems to have a lot of power behind it's apparent simplicity.

I love this, I also miss the more fun side of the internet that seems to be dwindling.

The best whimsical site I've seen in a while is https://hannahblair.co.uk/ , she made a whole Windows 95 Desktop remake as her personal site, including some remakes of some classic software, it's really amazing!

You just reminded me of https://poolside.fm/

This is one of the coolest sites I’ve ever seen! I love every part of it!

Amusing that her Behance profile says she's 21 - meaning she probably wasn't even alive when Windows 95 was released, and certainly almost never used it!

I guess retro isn't just to satisfy nostalgia.

Not necessarily, I'm only a couple years older and school computers were always incredibly out of date and running 95/98/2000

It reminded me to https://theuselessweb.com/.

Nice work!

I love the idea of this site - we build sites for clients so we'll be sure to submit them!

When you drag a finger (or a clicked mouse cursor) on https://xn--bj8a.com/404/ page, there is a burst of logos (144 per second) coming underneath.

This is so very beautiful! Pure joy to click through each one of those websites.

Absolutely fuck this site for playing a loud noise when you click the "joy" link. I don't associate jump scares with joy.

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