These days when I build a website, I design them with the mindset that I want to subtlety troll the web design zeitgeist. As such, most of my designs these days

These days when I build a website, I design them with the mindset that I want to subtlety troll the web design zeitgeist. As such, most of my designs these days are inspired by resources like https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ and http://modalzmodalzmodalz.com/ http://modalzmodalzmodalz.com/ Let’s look at how I applied those towards my sites: https://legiblenews.com/ https://legiblenews.com/ is just a mother fucking website, with dark mode. It’s responsive, accessible, and fast. So fast that it’s unofficially the fastest news website on the planet https://legiblenews.com/speed https://legiblenews.com/speed https://www.thingybase.com/ https://www.thingybase.com/ is full of childish sketches that I made on my iPad Pro. Each sketch took maybe 30 minutes. It’s fun. It’s whimsical. It’s a website that’s not taking design too seriously, but it works, is fast, and is usable. It’s also modal free, with the exception of the Rails deletion confirmation dialogs that I’ll be replacing with an undo. And finally my absolute worst designed website is https://www.imageomatic.com/ https://www.imageomatic.com/, which is alpha at v0.1, is a super lame sketch with a handwritten tagline. I am trying to prove a point that people overthink design. What matters is if the product is useful, usable, and if the design looks authentic to the people and company behind it. Inauthentic design is when small companies throw gobs of money at their sites or applications trying to make their websites look like a billion dollar company, like Stripe. Authentic design is when a small company, like mine listed above, don’t try to pretend they have a huge design budgets. Inevitably when small companies pretend they have a big design budget, they end up with something that starts looking janky over time because the funds and people needed to maintain it aren’t there.