I think these sites look very attractive, but this is a very subjective and specific definition of "good". Many of these pages do not finish loading in 3 seconds, for example. I'm not sure it would be correct to frame these as "astronomically good" web design.
The vibe I'm getting is "glossy magazine"… though given I've not actually touched a glossy magazine outside of a waiting room in about a decade, it's entirely possible I'm out of date.
That’s what I’m noticing as well. The content loads, then the content slightly changes once the styling loads and then the additional large sized content loads and then the animations load. So you’re trying to explore the website while everything is constantly resizing, populating along with animations playing all over the place. Also, there is a lot of scroll bar control being taken over. It just feels so limiting to the user to scroll, which I don’t particularly enjoy about modern web design trends. I understand that animations and scroll bar triggered events are great for product release pages, but I just don’t think they’re palpable on a home page.
You know what's astronomically bad? The website that tricks you into clicking on it by presenting newsletter subscription popup and then starting to load all animated videos at once.
I'll start: many of these are catchy, and even well executed. Many of them perform very poorly on my Linux VM running on a modest Windows host (VM ~6 GB RAM, 2x CPU, i7, no GPU).
That said, godly.website loaded very quickly and seemed to perform well.
I think there is barely room to hate this type of website. It knows what it is.
Another comment described it as a “glossy magazine” vibe, which seems perfectly apt. Lots of us bemoan the fact that the internet isn’t a textbook or newspaper anymore. It is annoying when, like, NYT or something like that goes in a silly direction, but we’re not out here complaining that Mad Magazine and the backs of cereal boxes aren’t functional.
It's sad to see how many of these projects are web3/crypto/nft related. I suppose the plus side here is that some devs/designers were able to (hopefully) make a decent paycheck making interesting work before the bubble(s) burst.
Probably an unpopular opinion, but honestly I wish MVC-type development was still popular. I'm working on a side project that doesn't need any of this animation or partial page reloads/rerendering, and I'm using .NET 6 MVC. Development is so much faster.
So much motion going on with these sites... I actually find most of these to pretty bad, just flashy. Great websites are fast, clean, organized, give me what I want with minimal fuss and look great at the same time.
The only conclusion I can draw is that "astronomically good web design" primarily concerns itself with ensuring that no more than eight words can appear onscreen simultaneously.
Does anyone have a web design inspiration site that's focused on sites that just look good and have a good UI & UX instead of collecting the most out there canvas animation thingies? Those might look good, but I can't get inspired by something that I can't replicate without a team of multidisciplinary people doing 3D design, WebGL, etc.
I used to have a number of good ones added to my RSS reader, but they have slowly cease to update. I could google for inspiration sites like that, but I know google will only give me listicle SEO spam.
What happened with the "above the fold" rule, that we put important info where the user don't need to scroll.
I clicked through some of them and I only see huge titles with parallax.
In e-commerce space you might take a look at: https://theheadlessclub.com/. It's exactly what you're looking for. Quote from about page:
"Most directories tend to put emphasis on shiny and showy hyper-animated web experiments. Unfortunately, many of these projects fail when criteria like performance, mobile, usability, and accessibility are considered. It’s hard to find one single resource on the internet that would combine both the technological excellence and highly polished design in ecommerce space. The Headless Club started as an internal agency tool to foster ecommerce best-practices across our development team. Now we’re sharing our findings with you."
Disclaimer: I'm the co-author (with folks from commerce-ui.com agency). We'll soon make it not specific to headless but to all e-commerce stores.
Headless means that you're using e-commerce platform only via API and build your front-end in whatever tech you want (next, nuxt, Remix, etc). It's different from a traditional approach when e-commerce platform handles front-end (HTML templates rendering). In Shopify can do both.
Funny that headless is now considered "traditional," when that was considered standard for a decade and a half. Relying on the platform was considered amateur.
"Traditional" is just another way to say "what was once the norm", so your comment is a bit pleonastic.
Is relying on the platform no longer considered amateur? If yes, call me old fashioned, because I've never liked those platforms...
Those might look good, but I can't get inspired by something that I can't replicate without a team of multidisciplinary people doing 3D design, WebGL, etc.
I'm with you. 98% of these lists are worthless for inspiration because they're mostly at student portfolio pieces or mock ups.
Show me some good accessible, fast, commercial designs that I can be inspired by and learn from, not some design agency's 3D spinning radishes blocking the text.
Bonus points if they manage to work in display advertising in a tasteful way.
While not exactly what you asked for and instead a single article containing a collection of advice, albeit concretely illustrated in an arguably useful fashion, I can attest at least that I've found this one useful:
I have a similar gripe that many of these design inspiration websites that I'm trying to use to inform all kinds of design objectives. They seem to be singularly focused on landing pages, but there are great ideas and implementations out there to full applications design. I wish we could find more inspiration for Interactions, user flows, how to show a lot of information in one viewport without overwhelming the user, and so on.
I may be an old millennial, but wow I do not like the giant text and frivolous animations everywhere. It's like we're designing bill boards nowadays as standard for the web. Might as well bring back marquee tags and those silly 90s website GIFs.
RIP Flash-only Web sites, you were just born too early, we had to wait for CSS3 and unsecured AWS buckets to match your stunning beauty and butt-clenching security flaws.
Ol' Gen-Xer here - Oh, we do remember Flash only sites... I remember having to build one or maybe two of them even, of course after trying ultimately in vain to explain to the client just how bad an idea it was. Though this was still in the times before the security issues, before the Adobe years.
Quick aside, these are all marketing sites, so if you're looking for application UX/UI inspiration (which I was) this is not the thing.
A good number of these are aimed at developers, meaning I'm in their target market. So I'm going to state my opinion, knowing full well that these tactics are super prevalent which means presumably they work and I may well be an outlier. But I hope I'm not... ...so with that hope in mind...
If you want to market to me (Us?) - don't build this shit. Seriously, just don't. If I'm your target market, this isn't actually good web design.
Yeah, it's eye catchy, but you're making me dig for what I want to know: Does this actually solve my problem? The more marketing flash you put on top of that, the more I experience a sneaking suspicion that you're all style and no substance.
If you want to sell to me, use good clean UX that is pleasantly styled, but not flashy. And get to the point. Show me exactly what I need to know as fast as humanly possible, with a minimum of distraction and cognitive load. Show me your features. Show me your UX. Don't use graphical representations of your UX, show me the real thing. Screenshots of actual use cases. Show me how you handle the use cases that matter to me, your prospective user.
The more you hide your actual product, and try to distract me with fancy flash, the less likely I am to open up a conversation. I don't have time for this shit when I'm shopping for dev tooling. Make it as easy as humanly possible for me to determine whether you solve my problem in the way I need as quickly as humanly possible.
Maybe I'm an exception, but personally I think good web design is a design that communicates quickly, clearly, and cleanly while minimizing cognitive load.
These are not that. Many of them are expressly the opposite of that.
Edit: For those of you saying that sales are targeting managers not devs... uh... well... uh... I spent the last 5 years as DevOps/SRE Manager/Director so... uh... some of us keep our dev sensibilities I guess?
Nah, the reality is that most developer tools are B2C in disguise (with B2B pricing), and that in fact these polished marketing sites are perfect for the junior developers and PMs at large orgs who actually adopt free trials of things.
From your parent:
> Does this actually solve my problem? The more marketing flash you put on top of that, the more I experience a sneaking suspicion that you're all style and no substance.
This kind of person doesn't pay for stuff or asks too many questions. "CTOs" are the worst customers. They are always nickel and diming, willing to go through immense grief to "just" "use" "open source" and squeeze free from everywhere. This isn't bad, it's aligned with successful businesses. I'm saying that the people who pay for stuff are lazy, too, in a good way.
There are dozens of us (Arrested Development reference)!
Seriously though I think we are pretty rare for wanting to cut through the BS. I've talked with a lot of people about this and while many will agree with me, when they actually see the results they don't like it as much as the flashy. It's disheartening.
I feel like, more often than not, people's picks for "great design" are really just a massive image and some fancy type around it
Sadly I have neither the photography skills, nor the type licenses, nor the actual need for a massive hero image in 99 out of 100 projects, so thanks but no thanks.
I'll keep digging and banging my head against the screen.
This list is possibly as useful as asking Midjourney for inspiration, except half as fun
A big proportion of visitors will never see these sites at their astronomical best, as they will visit it with their phone.
Sites with animations and crazy stuff happening on desktop, but then show a small subset of that design on mobile are like ad campaigns made for Cannes: fun for the industry, but misses the mark in terms of market value.
Hot take :
This is so "too much design" that we cannot even perceive content through it. It feels like "astronomically good" web design is about 72pt centered Helvetica and lazy-loading type of animations showing colorful picture and throwing some catch-phrases there and there.
All of these designs are horrible. They're not good, they're clever. These are interactive experiences, not websites. But that's all you can and should expect from marketing pages nowadays.
A good web design prioritises UX and accessibility, not first impressions for the sake of sales. Let your sales team take care of the first impressions, and focus on building a usable site instead of a clever one.
I agree with basically everything said here in the comments but wanted to add... after a certain amount of time a modal window popped up telling me to enter my email address to join their newsletter. It had no X button indicated anywhere. I thought I was trapped until I just tried clicking off of it.
While I like that functionality being available, an X to indicate that the thing is not required feels pretty necessary to me. I almost just closed the site when I thought it was required.
Lots of crypto/NFT stuff which matches the maximum-hype aesthetic that is being selected for here. I suppose I wouldn't expect anything else from "Godly – Astronomically good web design inspiration" hosted at godly.website
Good web design != good marketing design. Once marketers got control of UI design, every web interface became an interactive motion graphic, which is NOT. GOOD. UI. DESIGN.
All of these websites look like cancer to use. HN is peak web design. It gives exactly as much information as I need and has zero fluff, plus it loads super fast.
> It gives exactly as much information as I need and has zero fluff, plus it loads super fast
All new sites I load by default in Firefox with NoScript active. If it's blank or useless, I move on.
The side effect is that an awful lot of sites load really fast and I rarely have to put up with the "we care about your privacy (while hoping to sell you out under the guise of legitimate interest)" cookie pop-up BS...
93 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadGlossy isn't my cup of tea.
Would be lying though to say I wasn't inspired by some of the sites they showcase.
I'll start: many of these are catchy, and even well executed. Many of them perform very poorly on my Linux VM running on a modest Windows host (VM ~6 GB RAM, 2x CPU, i7, no GPU).
That said, godly.website loaded very quickly and seemed to perform well.
Another comment described it as a “glossy magazine” vibe, which seems perfectly apt. Lots of us bemoan the fact that the internet isn’t a textbook or newspaper anymore. It is annoying when, like, NYT or something like that goes in a silly direction, but we’re not out here complaining that Mad Magazine and the backs of cereal boxes aren’t functional.
I take your point.
A few of these definitely get it right, but most of the animation-heavy ones load slow on my phone.
I used to have a number of good ones added to my RSS reader, but they have slowly cease to update. I could google for inspiration sites like that, but I know google will only give me listicle SEO spam.
https://pixelfika.com/pixels
https://cssline.com/
https://www.siteinspire.com/
https://minimal.gallery/
(I learned about this here on HN If I recall correctly)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35225097
"Most directories tend to put emphasis on shiny and showy hyper-animated web experiments. Unfortunately, many of these projects fail when criteria like performance, mobile, usability, and accessibility are considered. It’s hard to find one single resource on the internet that would combine both the technological excellence and highly polished design in ecommerce space. The Headless Club started as an internal agency tool to foster ecommerce best-practices across our development team. Now we’re sharing our findings with you."
Disclaimer: I'm the co-author (with folks from commerce-ui.com agency). We'll soon make it not specific to headless but to all e-commerce stores.
Is that like having an eComm shop built atop Shopify?
https://www.shopify.com/enterprise/headless-commerce
I'm with you. 98% of these lists are worthless for inspiration because they're mostly at student portfolio pieces or mock ups.
Show me some good accessible, fast, commercial designs that I can be inspired by and learn from, not some design agency's 3D spinning radishes blocking the text.
Bonus points if they manage to work in display advertising in a tasteful way.
https://medium.com/refactoring-ui/7-practical-tips-for-cheat...
https://mobbin.com/
These days Times Square is all about video. Times have changed but the purpose is still the same, make you buy something.
\<thousand-yard-stare \/\>
A good number of these are aimed at developers, meaning I'm in their target market. So I'm going to state my opinion, knowing full well that these tactics are super prevalent which means presumably they work and I may well be an outlier. But I hope I'm not... ...so with that hope in mind...
If you want to market to me (Us?) - don't build this shit. Seriously, just don't. If I'm your target market, this isn't actually good web design.
Yeah, it's eye catchy, but you're making me dig for what I want to know: Does this actually solve my problem? The more marketing flash you put on top of that, the more I experience a sneaking suspicion that you're all style and no substance.
If you want to sell to me, use good clean UX that is pleasantly styled, but not flashy. And get to the point. Show me exactly what I need to know as fast as humanly possible, with a minimum of distraction and cognitive load. Show me your features. Show me your UX. Don't use graphical representations of your UX, show me the real thing. Screenshots of actual use cases. Show me how you handle the use cases that matter to me, your prospective user.
The more you hide your actual product, and try to distract me with fancy flash, the less likely I am to open up a conversation. I don't have time for this shit when I'm shopping for dev tooling. Make it as easy as humanly possible for me to determine whether you solve my problem in the way I need as quickly as humanly possible.
Maybe I'm an exception, but personally I think good web design is a design that communicates quickly, clearly, and cleanly while minimizing cognitive load.
These are not that. Many of them are expressly the opposite of that.
Edit: For those of you saying that sales are targeting managers not devs... uh... well... uh... I spent the last 5 years as DevOps/SRE Manager/Director so... uh... some of us keep our dev sensibilities I guess?
I'm certain due to human psychology, that the more "polished" a site looks, it translates into more leads
From your parent:
> Does this actually solve my problem? The more marketing flash you put on top of that, the more I experience a sneaking suspicion that you're all style and no substance.
This kind of person doesn't pay for stuff or asks too many questions. "CTOs" are the worst customers. They are always nickel and diming, willing to go through immense grief to "just" "use" "open source" and squeeze free from everywhere. This isn't bad, it's aligned with successful businesses. I'm saying that the people who pay for stuff are lazy, too, in a good way.
Seriously though I think we are pretty rare for wanting to cut through the BS. I've talked with a lot of people about this and while many will agree with me, when they actually see the results they don't like it as much as the flashy. It's disheartening.
Having said that, I recently enjoyed Val.Town's homepage [1]. It manages to keep things fun while showing me what I can actually do with it.
[1] https://www.val.town/
Yeah, I like Val's. That's how you do it :)
The second site featured is promoting "Become a 10x designer!"
That tells you everything you need to know about how substantive this list is.
Sadly I have neither the photography skills, nor the type licenses, nor the actual need for a massive hero image in 99 out of 100 projects, so thanks but no thanks.
I'll keep digging and banging my head against the screen.
This list is possibly as useful as asking Midjourney for inspiration, except half as fun
Then change little details when you find yourself with a strong opinion.
Then over time you can incorporate ideas from your memory as well (which are still mostly derivative). Im pretty sure this is what everyone is doing.
_cries in early 2010s designs_
Like I don't want one giant page with scrolling-bound effects. Just give me the damn content.
Sites with animations and crazy stuff happening on desktop, but then show a small subset of that design on mobile are like ad campaigns made for Cannes: fun for the industry, but misses the mark in terms of market value.
A good web design prioritises UX and accessibility, not first impressions for the sake of sales. Let your sales team take care of the first impressions, and focus on building a usable site instead of a clever one.
While I like that functionality being available, an X to indicate that the thing is not required feels pretty necessary to me. I almost just closed the site when I thought it was required.
Overall 3/10 "good webdesign"
Most of "best websites" directories are for "installation art". Not usable, money-making design. It's art for artists.
But to be fair, we developers often do the same thing. We get too excited about dev-only things that don't always have much business value.
All new sites I load by default in Firefox with NoScript active. If it's blank or useless, I move on.
The side effect is that an awful lot of sites load really fast and I rarely have to put up with the "we care about your privacy (while hoping to sell you out under the guise of legitimate interest)" cookie pop-up BS...