Stolen Buttons
anatolyzenkov.com
anatolyzenkov.com
Sometimes I think it'd be great if that was how the internet actually worked.
There's an example of how you can juice up a simple "delete" button with various levels of UX. I encourage you to play around with it to juice up your own buttons!
The "souled" version of the Clif Bar site and the Amazon Video pause menu are good examples of the pendulum perhaps swinging back . Even today they give "overbusy" more than "rewarding."
That said, the hover/push feedback instantly reminded me of my own "Motherfucking Website" variant and the effects I give ordinary hyperlinks (an on-hover and on-click interaction, via CSS).
I'm old-school. :)
I agree that most of the other ones don’t look very button like to me either. But even so I would probably understand that most of them were buttons when I saw them in context on a page.
The flat style has been around for a while now, so I’ve gotten used to it even though when I started using computers it was on Windows 95 with the grey rectangular buttons with shaded sides that give them the “3d effect”.
And even flat style buttons often have changes when you hover and click, but it seems that they didn’t copy that part on this button collection page.
No wonder OSX felt like the future.
I miss the future.
I'd say the same for the scrollbars, but these days I'd settle for reverting to them being visible at all times.
And if you really wanted to, maybe made some concessions, and were clever about it, you could maybe find a way so that users define shapes and functionality and a default light/dark color scheme, but applications could still use the "user style" with their own color scheme, and allow the user to switch between that and the user defined colors.
It would also have the side effect of ejecting the people who just change things to make their mark. There is no more mark to make! Except making the "style configurator" for the user better, collaborating on expanding the protocol shared between it and websites/applications. You can invent a new type of button, put it on the pile, and hope it becomes one of the higher rated ones that gets downloaded and used a lot, on any OS, in any application or website. That will be a lot less interesting for hack frauds, and software interfaces can finally become awesome and then just better from there.
Update: The Pixel Perfect checkbox makes a noticeable difference in appearance. I presume this is because older systems were developed before the advent of anti-aliasing, and were designed pixel by pixel.
Introducing Mac OS X's Aqua interface, Steve Jobs said at Macworld in January 2000: "We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them."
https://getbootstrap.com/1.0.0/
They may have peaked with 2.0:
The bas-relief era of UI design now feels like a golden era, and the early "Aqua" versions of Mac OS X the ultimate evolution.
Everything since then feels like we're regressing.
The "add comment" button for this comment is literally a solid blue roundrect. It's not even obvious that it's clickable.
We are seeing more and more appliances coming out with less buttons and a mobile app to access advanced features. Also cars (annoyingly) are coming out with more physical controls replaced by touchscreen interfaces. It's not hard to imagine a world without physical buttons becoming a reality.
The days of digital buttons might also be numbered. Apps designed for touched enabled interfaces, particularly on mobiles, support swipes and gestures to perform different actions. There is no obvious indication you can perform an action with a swipe or gesture. Having grown up pre-internet with physical buttons, dials, sliders etc I automatically look for the digital equivalent for interaction, I don't assume I can swipe or gesture to do something. I have to resort to searching for "how do I do x with y" to find out.
Children on the other hand spend a lot of time playing with new things. they are far more likely to discover swipe or gesture through play. As an adult I am much more task oriented, I'm not looking to play I'm looking to get the thing done.
As children grow up in a world without physical buttons, they may not see the relevance of digital equivalents and lean towards swipe, gesture, voice control etc. Digital buttons may disappear.
An example of an similar technological shift happened for many pre-Boomers with the introduction of Video Cassette Recorders (VCRs). My father grew up with analog clocks and watches. Time was told by two or three hands on a clock face. When VCRs became more affordable in the 80s they came with digital clocks. He could read the time off the digital display but couldn't make the leap to setting a recording time by putting it into program mode then using buttons to set a record start time and duration. To him, time was set by moving the clock hands or twisting a watch dial.
The introduction of flat-UI bothered me in it threw away a visual indication that this "thing" is a clickable button. I obviously not fully adapted to swipes and gestures. I feel like a few steps down the path for whatever the future equivalent of "can't program the VCR" is. I hope the advent of LLMs will make it easy enough for application developers to produce multiple UIs for different classes of user button users, swipe users, whatever the next thing is (brain wave control??).
And thay is a regression and a mistake. Putting touch screens on cars was a big mistake, children will struggle to drive and turn on/off something as we do, you can't have reliable touch during vehicle movement. It's just stupid. I won't be surprised when regulators will requires some, not all, appliances to have hard buttons. Espacially cars. My car touch screen sometimes suffer a 1 second delay between touches, that's just bad product development, no children will adapt to that, only if braindead
In other news, though, I believe the HN button is just an HTML button, with a touch of font styling on it from HN. Linux on a Chrome-descended browser I'm just getting a grey box with a black outline, no 3D styling. It's not styled that way by HN. Everything else in the CSS properties for me is showing as "user agent stylesheet", e.g., the defaults.
At the very worst (which is what I did), make up a simple image in Adobe with a 3D effect, save it as a black-and-white bitmap, change the white to the color of the button. The make a second version in the same manner, but this time the shading of the button reversed.
Nexty setup the HTML so the on-press for the link pulled up the alternate button image. The reversed shading (when done properly) then looked like it was depressed.
Is that so much harder than adding the JavaScript and other code around it to make the simple animation some sites have? (At least with the on-press option, it didn’t require having JavaScript active just to animate some buttons.)
I understand that a lot of people hate JS ecosystem and etc., but we’ve moved on from that a while ago.
Although I’m more on infrastructure side of things nowadays, I don’t miss the early days’ of handwritten HTML.
The death of the button occurred on October 21, 2010, when Microsoft released Windows Phone 7 to the international market, beginning the Metro UI era.
Apple wouldn't catch up until September 17, 2014, when they unveiled iOS 7, ditching Steve Jobs's beloved skeuomorphism in favor of Jony Ive's signature flat style.
Google followed up on November 12, 2014, with Android 5.0 Lollipop's introduction of Material Design—arguably the least flat of the three, though it wouldn't stay that way forever.
They got rid of the button shadows, had them cycle through previews sometimes, and called them 'tiles', but they acted as buttons.
Which I think was the reason that Microsoft did it that way and Apple tried to resist a bit. But the developer push was substantial.
This depressing observation is regularly voiced (or thought) every time UX aesthetics come up... and I've yet to see so much as a sniffy defense.
My assumption this is because it's simply true; the only reason for churn is "fashion" requiring orbiting around a small space of viable options, strange-attractor style, and the vested interest an industry has in fueling the very modest pleasure that comes from tiny or bold steps from what is familiar to what is "fresh."
(By analogy: <https://effectiviology.com/bikeshedding-law-of-triviality/>.)
The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in area; obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion; for although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric writing. And writing of some kind the bulk of these designs seemed certainly to be; though my memory, despite much familiarity with the papers and collections of my uncle, failed in any way to identify this particular species, or even to hint at its remotest affiliations.
Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive.
- The Call of Cthulhu, Ch 1. The Horror in Clay
there are others i think
I used it for a bit until I realized... I probably didn't want a third party reading all my traffic. But I did like having it for a bit.
(It is linked from the page, but given how the whole page is CTAs... it's hard to notice!)
Unfortunately the browser extension permissions are not granular enough to warn you when fetch is being used in an extension.
As an example, my password manager extension can read and inject content into any page along with communicating with its server to sync my vault. These are the only permissions Firefox shows me:
* Access your data for all websites
* Get data from the clipboard
* Input data to the clipboard
* Display notifications to you
* Access browser tabs
* Access browser activity during navigation
Almost all of them are animated, move when hovered, move when clicked, or sometimes all three. Just awful. LLMs keep making buttons like this and I keep telling them not to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Buttons_(1962_film)
The buttons (at 2:25) : https://youtu.be/O5StEEzpT04?t=145
Just putting this out there for those who are not in the know. This type of crisis is easily avoidable.
I hope there will be some kind of online museum of web design trends before the web turns into something else, and maybe paradigms such as "buttons" will stop being as interesting any more.
I guess I should
Jetzt loslegen
Maybe something like tvtropes.com, but for web application design, and of course with visual examples.
I reported it to the FBI but still no response from them. This shit is serious guys and when will it end?
Gtk has some nice standard looking buttons for you. You know how those look, and I'm pretty sure you don't want that.
Think to when "UI experts" impose edicts from top down, such as "flat design" or "material". Are you really happy about that?
The fact that we're even looking in awe at this list is amazing. If everything were the same, this wouldn't even be interesting.
This is fun and we need more of it in the world.
Company> Where has my button gone? Our website it broken
Anatoly Zenkov> Buha ha ha... I got your buttons!
Company> What do you want? Give my button back, pls.
Anatoly Zenkov> I need 1 billion dollars. Muh ha ha. Since you said pls, I'll give 10% friends & family discount.
It would be cool if you could steal them but that would probably be bad.
SUBJECT: Adversarial Distillation of Frontier UI Buttons
The United States leads the world in user interface (UI) technologies. That lead reflects decades of foundational design research, bold aesthetic risk-taking, and millions of hours of front-end development. Our button leadership drives click-through rates, strengthens conversion funnels, and advances the frontiers of e-commerce, digital art, and human-computer interaction. The interactive breakthroughs emerging from original designers raise aesthetic standards, expand interactivity, and improve user experiences around the world.
However, we have information indicating that a specific actor, principally based in Hamburg, Germany—operating under the name Anatoly Zenkov—is engaged in a deliberate, industrial-scale campaign to distill frontier UI buttons. Leveraging inspect-element developer tools to bypass basic DOM protections and using extraction techniques to expose proprietary CSS and SVG information, this coordinated campaign systematically extracts hover states and active properties from target websites, exploiting U.S. design expertise and innovation.
Buttons developed from surreptitious, unauthorized distillation campaigns like this do not replicate the full performance of the original. They do, however, enable this actor to release consolidated web galleries that appear to perform comparably on select hover-state benchmarks at a fraction of the design cost. These distillation campaigns also allow the actor to deliberately strip functional JavaScript from the resulting buttons and undo mechanisms that ensure those UI elements actually submit forms, navigate pages, or add items to a shopping cart.
We remain committed to the free and fair development of web technologies across a competitive ecosystem, from leading frontier design systems to highly tuned CSS libraries, and from open-source frameworks to open-component models. UI distillation, when legitimately used via tutorials or CodePens to produce smaller, lighter-weight components from more advanced systems, is a vital part of that ecosystem. Industrial button-theft activities that aim to systematically undermine original designers are not.
There is nothing innovative about systematically extracting and copying the CSS of the design industry, and there is nothing open about supposedly open button galleries that are derived from acts of malicious UI exploitation. As methods to detect and mitigate industrial-scale element extraction grow more sophisticated, individuals in Hamburg who build their portfolios on such fragile foundations should have little confidence in the integrity and reliability of the buttons they produce.
Now let’s see Paul Allen’s buttons