Arwes: Futuristic Sci-Fi UI Web Framework

this is beautiful, congrats and thank you for sharing

wow, that is really cool! are you using a UI library or are these custom built?

I really like this, thanks for sharing.

Love the fade-in animations. Really awesome.

The only problem I have (on laptop) is the font combined with the text size (10pt) on the blog is a bit on the smaller side. I recommend bumping up the font of the body to at least 14pt to increase readability for most screens.

This is so sick. Blows Arwes out of the water.

Very cool, but distracting that the very first top left attention grabbing glyph is an unrelated company's logo https://polygon.technology/

Very impressive, and works well on mobile (iOS). Congrats and thanks for sharing.

Very cool, reminds me of 2advanced.com - a very slick flash website from 2001 that now only exists in a museum.

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/2advanced-studios-v3...

Maybe you can make a UI library out of it too!

I love this.

Arwes is about 20% too over the top for me or I would really be tempted to build something in it.

But the style ofyour site is almost exactly what I want. Are you open sourcing your component library/styling by any chance? Also, what does 'FUI' mean in this context?

If we were speculating what UIs will look like in the future and came up with something good, why wouldn't we just do them right now? As soon as you do it's inherently no longer "the future."

> This is what early internet thought "the future" looks like for the web

And years later we got mobile-style interfaces and designs that are present on almost every device we interact with. Big elements where sometimes it's impossible to tell the state or even distinguish link from informative text - things which are often utilized in dark patterns tactics

Arwes feels pretty well done but rather from a period somewhere between 2005 and 2012, rather than "the future" but it is ofc done in a futuristic style

There is design diversity, but you're just not going to find it on mainstream sites or apps because they're catering to the everyman. When that occurs, you're tossing away novelty for a sense of expectation.

Much in the same way you can find a variety of art but the majority that gets attention are hyper-realistic works. It's just easier to understand for the everyman.

> I am wondering why there isn't design diversity

Because it doesn't serve much practical purpose. Uniquely designed websites take much more effort (and cash for companies) to create, and they look cool, but they are much harder to use for the average user

It's fine for things like advertisements - I've never gone the website for a movie but I imagine this is what those websites should try to be. Is it worth the effort?

If you're trying to make a website people use it's not worth it

Flash died and there wasn't much of a replacement tool. Timeline oriented vector graphics are great for designers but hard to do well with raw HTML.

When flat design started to become a thing I was very excited. It was beautiful. But then EVERYTHING became flat and now I’m extremely bored.

Just recently I started using reddit and stumbled upon the old version of the site. Look at this subreddit, it’s absolutely gorgeous and goes very well with the theme of the discussions:

https://old.reddit.com/r/gameofthrones/

A lot of alternative visual designs run into problems with the technical realities of modern UI tooling. I'm going to talk about web tech, but Android layout works largely the same, last I checked (one trillion years ago, to be fair).

The futuristic UI look that Arwes is doing comes with a whole lot of animation, which is very cumbersome on the web. The CSS transition property is good, but it works on a very narrow range of properties, and anything involving inserting/deleting/adding elements needs a whole song and dance to trigger the animation then go clean it up when it's done. You can do it, but it's a whole lot of extra work.

Most other stylized looks involve big chonky stylized borders and background graphics. But we generally want the same style to work on mobile, and the chonkier your borders, the harder it is to cram it into reduced space. (Also CSS still doesn't have native 9-patches for some absurd reason. It used to be how everything was done, until the world agreed to stop abusing tables.)

Meanwhile the modern flat look is easy to implement in CSS and doesn't have any trouble scaling down to mobile. And it's still a good enough look, it'd even be kind of striking if it wasn't ubiquitous.

> Web design in general seems so derivative and uninspired

The people paid to make websites have instructions to build them for the broadest audience possible. Websites are commodities first. You wouldn't expect a pamphlet at the doctor's office to have a particularly avant-garde design.

Now that doesn't mean that we can't have more design variety for websites. But unfortunately, websites are not seen in the same way as other forms of art like video games or movies, where veering from the norm is encouraged. Additionally, the death of Flash and GUI-based web tooling in general means that the people capable of building complex designs like this have formal training in writing code. And people like that usually are not building sites for novelty use cases.

But it looks so pretty on camera

Windows 8 and Windows Mobile embraced this aesthetic, and I thought it the best mainstream UI we've gotten since the 32-bit era. Everything resolves back to a straight edge, because computer screens are largely square, not round. Every object has a bold, flat color so you can easily and immediately identify it. And the background is matte black. None more black. Windows Mobile on an AMOLED display was a thing of beauty. It's too bad the design regressed in Windows 10 before proper dark mode was released for desktop, because by the time we finally got the clean backgrounds that would really make stuff pop outside the start menu, they'd already ruined the whole UI (including the start menu).

Of course this latest Windows feels like Microsoft designers have fallen completely into Mac OS X redux, which to me makes computers look like some kind of ridiculous hand-carved artifact from antiquity instead of the modern, practical tools they are. Alas, what could have been.

Thank you for this walk down memory lane—2advanced was a huge inspiration for me when I started web design and learning flash, but I couldn't remember the name of the site until now. Their 2003 design is burned into my memory.

Yes! 2advanced served as an inspiration. I remember surfing it in awe of what was possible to do.

The quirkiness of the web has been somewhat lost. However, I do wonder whether that is just a factor of its expansion and whether somewhere in the depths it still lurks, waiting to be uncovered.

Thank you! This brought back memories, I never thought I'd come across that UI again

This is the first thing I thought of when I saw this! I began learning how to build websites during this era and was always in awe of their work.

They actually have a site with a playground (linked from the Github page) - https://playground.arwes.dev/

Reason: They don't want to be usable by users (yet).

This should apply to all products. Have a framework or a library? Show me some examples, use cases, demos of what it can do and how it does it.

I actually listen to Soul Extract regularly now after finding it through this UI library!

A bit unfair to compare a new framework with websites made in Flash decades ago... nothing can compete against Flash websites.

On all of those but especially the second two you can really see the influence The Designers Republic had on pop culture and graphic design in the late 90s and early 00’s.

Unusability peak IMO.

His website is also very interesting: https://porterrobinson.com/

Futuristic design is ironically very retro

Yeah, the funniest thing is that this adds latency to elements appearing as a stylistic choice.

This is a stylistic callback to slower systems, like BBS on a slow connection, or UIs on a slow computer.

"Retro-future" is a common term for it, at least in certain blogs and forums.

yeah it's interesting how the visual cues for what would give people the impression of something being futuristic have mostly settled into certain styles even as we move forward in time. what could be the possible reasons for this?

404

That sounds amazing. I wonder what the closest thing to that available today is.

The Albertus font would be a must-have.

Not OP but I'm interested. How should I DM you? (couldn't find one on your HN profile)

Build a front end for your local weather?

[0] https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api

How about a crypto exchange?

Bunch of previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24282270

I’m not a figma user. Are you able to point at a representative image?