18 points handfuloflight 2 hours ago 8 comments

darnfish 57 minutes ago | parent

All of these sites are independently created but viewed as a whole you would think they're all designed by the same group, which is the issue with modern design engineering. The herd mentality on X is quite nuts and I can count on two hands the number of truly unique software artists I know of and respect.

How many light gray, fully rounded buttons with a sans-serif font that darkens on hover can an industry make? How many scroll effects will satisfy you? I would love to see more experimentation within the industry. Unfortunately I don't see AI helping more than hurting here.

theokrueger 54 minutes ago | parent

The real "world's best websites" are ones that can display their static content performantly and responsively without JS, while correctly conforming to baseline.

FelineStateMach 43 minutes ago | parent

I'd rather vaguely gesture at data in the training corpus. That, at least, introduces some variance and forces me to add my spin on things after testing.

thom 34 minutes ago | parent

AI curated lists of homogenous websites, flayed to their bare bones to inspire the utterly uninspired. The internet is better and weirder than this, even in these dark hours.

sheo 33 minutes ago | parent

Disclaimer: I'm using reduced motion on my phone, please acknowledge this bias before reading my comment

All of those, citing the pricing page, "websites people remember" look the same and use the same handful of effects

- Fade in on scroll - Big letters - Punishment of firefox users - Fullscreen imagery - Cursor replacement - Annoying takeover of browser scrolling

Of course you would be impressed if you see something like this the first time. If every third company has websites like this, it gets annoying. I don't remember any of them

They look cool on twitter, how they perform independently of it?

I miss "boring" landings. Pretty ones, not wordpress or wix slop, not "beautiful, that's hard to forget. Make no mistakes" ahem...

Look at https://vercel.com/ , https://linear.app/ , https://notion.com , https://apple.com . They're simple, easy to quickly parse, don't take over your browser's decade old predictable patterns

They're pretty. But simple.

Gualdrapo 29 minutes ago | parent

I feel like this kind of websites that showcase "minimal" and "elegant" websites are just places where websites that want to be so trendy they all look kinda the same are being gathered. I'd bet more than half the websites shown here were made from a Framer template.

Take for example deadsimplesites.com, "The most minimal sites on the web, curated in one place" - most of them are nearly identical and, if you take a closer look, most of them are kinda the same framer template just filled with different data. And oh surprise, all of those "most minimal sites on the web" happen to be personal websites for product designers...

moribvndvs 16 minutes ago | parent

A who’s who of usability war crimes.

iamunr 7 minutes ago | parent

A mobbin clone?