HN Explorer

Ask HN: your favorite websites, design-wise?

6 points by keiferski ↗ HN
What are some of your favorite website designs? I'm talking more about web services, social networks, and the like (former and current startups), as opposed to Joe Schmo's consulting service website.

A few personal favorites:

Vimeo - Unquestionably the best-designed video site. It really helps to nurture the strong artsy/film community that makes Vimeo so special. http://www.vimeo.com

Hype Machine - not a web startup, per say, but I really like the format they use. Simple, clean, and easy to quickly listen to the hottest new stuff. http://hypem.com/

Grooveshark - much stronger than most music radio sites; I'm looking at you, Pandora! http://www.grooveshark.com

Twitter - great, compared to Facebook (and in its own right). I really like the clean and upbeat design flavor Twitter has. Twitter has to distill much more information in a newsfeed than Facebook and yet still manages to be more effective. http://www.twitter.com

Tumblr - obviously design is a strong part of Tumblr's culture and success. No question on it being one of the best-designed tech sites around. http://www.tumblr.com

Heroku - no experience using the service, but their home/about pages have that unique dark theme that works quite well. http://www.heroku.com

9 comments

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Ntagg
Shopify - shopify.com - I've always thought their site makes their service seem incredibly intuitive and easy to use, which suits their market well.
Ntagg
Foodzie - foodzie.com - I especially like how scalable their design is. Notice how they (or their sellers) are able to adapt their design to each seller's brand?
askar
Why not Facebook.com? It was one of the social network sites that stood out in terms of its clean and simple interface and still todate they've kept improving the many UI elements and have brought some nice touch to some of the UI elements (Facebox etc.)
keiferski
I'd definitely agree that Facebook used to be clean and simple. These days it's too busy, redundant, and disorganized.
Raphael
http://friendfeed.com/ -- Less really is more. Remember how Gmail looked before featuritis? The rare right-side menu, and it's customizable. The original mouseover profile cards, later implemented on Twitter and Facebook. Simple theming.

Tweetdeck -- In a world of white, this web app dares to be dark grey. Skinny columns for a dense matrix of information. I just wish it would snap to columns when scrolling horizontally.

http://arstechnica.com/ -- Pretty standard blog layout, yet tasteful from the maroon banner to the neat category logos. And a lot of elements just seem to line up. The writing's not bad either.

imkevingao
www.hulu.com . It's simple. It's easy to navigate.

Only bad thing is too many commercials. But the user interface is just awesome