Why does every website landing page look like this now? | Hacker News Reader

Why does every website landing page look like this now?

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24 pointsggcdn14 comments

I always find both website and logo design most puzzling, they obviously follow trends, but are these trends actually based on what the designers think users might find most attractive and useable? From the outside it looks more like a chain reaction of copying what another popular site is doing at the time.

Someone working on the design end of things might be able to enlighten me.

When it comes to logos some of the decisions are just baffling and feel like "change it just to change it".

> From the outside it looks more like a chain reaction of copying what another popular site is doing at the time

It's probably a non-designer manager telling a designer "We want it to look like this" and pointing at the popular site.

Not a designer, but by digging around in the Twitter thread, it looks like Facebook adopted this visual style in 2017 [1], and pretty much everybody else followed suit.

It's always like this. Some company puts out a new, carefully thought-out "look and feel" that feels fresh. Then the literal rest of the world, instead of actually studying why the new thing works and how it can be adapted to other context, starts flooding the world with quick copycats. See, e.g., BMW's "flat design" logo [2], or the "Web 2.0" aesthetics of pointless reflections and glassy UI elements.

[1]: https://www.buck.co/work/facebook-alegria

[2]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/4/21163766/bmw-new-flat-logo...

I've been watching my bootcamp students gravitate more and more towards this aesthetic. Not sure if it's good, bad or both. I think in terms of communicating professionalism and the ability to make all the aspects of a project adhere to professional standards and integrate well into a larger ecosystem I think it's good. At least in terms of communicating that to non-technical people which could include users, recruiters or maybe investors. If it bothers me at all it's only because it takes developers a lot of time (sometimes) to fight and kind of cover up parts of how html and the web behave on a more fundamental level. Slick websites kind of make the internet seem like inaccessible magic sometimes, at least they did for me before I became a dev.

I think I remember first getting déjà vu from websites with this style about two years ago. Fun that it is getting so overused now that more people are starting to notice. Below is a good article going into a bit more backstory on the style.

https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/dont-worry-these-gangley-armed-...

It seems that the picture of the web landing pages are ripped off from this original article and the article is also answering the very question that is being asked by the poster [1].

[1]https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/dont-worry-these-gangley-armed-...

I agree, would be nice to make some kind of curated list of businesses with nice and unique pages.

https://rekki.com comes to mind.

Gorgeous site! Thank you for posting :^)

Usability is horrible. Middle element follows scroll for a while and then stops. Background color changes on scroll. Blocks are placed everywhere. Spacing between elements is inconsistent.

Perhaps unpopular opinion, but I find that website too disorganized. Buttons are all over the place, rather than organized in one (or even more) location. Take the first page as an example: "About us" is by itself on the exact opposite side as "Contact". The phone outline on the first page also has no content except the 3 lines on the bottom and is just awkward whitespace, although you can click on it even though that isn't shown. Also, why do all the circle buttons rotate when you hover over them?

It's different for sure but I have no idea what they are trying to sell or communicate. It's like I need to learn how to use this site.

If this is considered good design, I don't want to be associated with the web anymore.

Because it's inoffensive, trendy, and easy to read, which is all most products want/need for their obligatory SEO sponge page.

It's a pattern that's easy to replicate.

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