UIDesignDaily 4 years later, 1600 open-source designs | Hacker News Reader

UIDesignDaily 4 years later, 1600 open-source designs

uidesigndaily.com

89 pointsildiko24 comments

I feel like there were two large types of website designs:

(1) those archaic ones you'd find on your professor's website, plain HTML, no CSS or CSS that was just intended to do something annoying (blinking cursor, sparkles, matrix background, etc.)

(2) What I would describe as 'modern modern' - the (good) designs on this website, or that look you would get if you hired a designer today to design a landing page .. rounded corners, gradients, whitespace everywhere, hiding important options behind 'Show more' buttons, etc. (I'm just trying to be descriptive)

But I feel like in the early-mid 2000s, there was more of a middleground. The type of design I saw on Reddit (old.reddit.com), hacker news, myspace at its peak, facebook in the early days, etc.

Does anyone know if there is a database of website designs like those? Or how I could find more website designs like those in general? Pages that do use CSS/JS, but not the extremes on either side ('only HTML', 'design everything')?

The biggest dissonance for me comes when an administrative backend or line-of-business application is given the sparse whitespace treatment with all the functionality hidden behind opaque submenus and mysterious hieroglyphs.

This seems to be a misguided attempt to apply, to power user interfaces, UX principles that were intended to ease & maximise casual visitor engagement for brochureware or B2C commerce.

What I actually want for these interfaces is high information density and a visible palette of clearly labelled action buttons. And there are way too many product managers that think dropping a bit of table padding, with a "dense mode" toggle, is the answer.

I feel like there was a Cambrian explosion of UI design around the period of Geocities and web 2.0 sites like Digg. The Web was still in the early days of being monetized, and it had a fraction of the investment it has in terms of dedicated design teams, and all of the a/b testing to identify optimal design patterns for driving various actions.

Today we have survival of the fittest, and non-commercial design largely mirrors it due to that being what the tools and libraries to make sites offer.

Take a look at neocities websites for a bit of that, otherwise I would also like to know something that compiles that look!

My sites are still all mid-2000s HTML/CSS/Lite vanilla JS, even my businesses site.

Do you have links? I'd be curious to see them

sure, derekburgess.com

I really like this. Does just what it should.

Why are these all so...dribbblized [0]? They don't seem like real, actual designs for real people to use, they're more like aesthetically pleasing art pieces that just so happen to have some functionality attached, or implied.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6406898

I know it’s meant as a dig but I’ll take it as a compliment. I created my first user interface 13 years ago. Since then I went on to get a masters’s degree in visual communication and built up a decade of experience in the industry doing UI/UX and front end development. I don’t care if it’s back handed, if you tell me my work looks great I appreciate it.

It's not a dig, it's a legitimate question. Do you have any examples of designs used in real apps? Would be curious to check them out because most of these don't look like anything I'm implementing in my work, as a frontend/fullstack developer either.

Very nice! Such a good resource you’ve created. Apologies if I’m just being blind but is there a way to search/filter the designs?

Thank you! I haven’t implemented search yet but that’s the next big feature on my list. Filtering should work on the home page based on software type, and if you click on a post you can then filter on related tags. I hope that helps!

Not to be the “have you tried AI?” guy, but I feel like this could be a GREAT use case for some kind of LLM-powered search! “Show me good options for displaying dense data” or something would be sooooo cool.

Hey, OP here :) Happy new year! I hope you’ll find this useful. I have quite a few designs I haven’t posted yet but I’ll get to it in the days to come! Cheers

Awesome work! I had seen this a few years ago, then I was looking for your site earlier this week but had forgotten the name. So great to see that you’re still continuing to post new designs.

Thank you!!

Quick tip: You can grab any image, and use the GPT vision API to convert it into code, it does a pretty decent job.

You can try this at Brewed.dev

Disclaimer: I'm the developer of the tool.

No HTML/CSS?

Just image mockups?

That is what designers do, yes. They typically do not (and are not expected to) create the actual HTML and CSS, that's the job of the front-end engineer.

Like architects designing absurd but original buildings.

Yep, then it's on the structural and civil engineers to pare it down until it gets to an actually physically possible state.

Figma mocks give most of the info you need to map to HTML/CSS pretty easily, much more so than image mocks

It tells you the colors and will show you spacing etc

Holy crap. Actual clear design with a cogent visual hierarchy, intuitively purposed controls, and functionality exposed enough to be useful for people without a working mental model of software development, that’s FOSS. I am honestly shocked. Too bad FOSS project maintainers think design only exists for idiots- I.e. users who care more about whether a program effectively and efficiently solves a problem for them than about software architecture. Was initially sad to see I got to this party late, but not after I saw a few requisite dunning Kruger comments. Imagine what Mastodon could have done for the world during the Twitter exodus if the FOSS world didn’t so aggressively resist considering user needs?

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