14 ms·

Godly – Astronomically good web design inspiration

223 points by spansoa 3y ago

jxf 3y ago
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.
- ben_w 3y ago
  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I've not actually touched a glossy magazine outside of a waiting room in about a decade, it's entirely possible I'm out of date. Glossy isn't my cup of tea.
  - galaxyLogic 3y ago
    These are basically all ads for something. It is like with TV-ads they are "glossy" in their own way, trying to catch the attention to sell something.
  - asteroidz 3y ago
    This has always been my feeling about the well-known https://www.awwwards.com/ https://www.awwwards.com/ Would be lying though to say I wasn't inspired by some of the sites they showcase.
- sitzkrieg 3y ago
  yea this appears to be biased towards design and ui , maybe not even ux on some of the busy ones
- Savely 3y ago
  Agree. Most of the presented sites are too dynamic for my taste, I don’t like when something on a page moves purposelessly.
- lotsofpizza 3y ago
  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.
  - galaxyLogic 3y ago
    Why don't they load the CSS first, then HTML, then scripts?
    - FridgeSeal 3y ago
      “Who cares about performance, if our users cared about performance they’d tell us” - PM’s everywhere.
butz 3y ago
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.
- gpderetta 3y ago
  Well, lucky you, I only see an endless list of spinners.
DiggyJohnson 3y ago
This will be a fun conversation. 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.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  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.
  - DiggyJohnson 3y ago
    I certainly don't "hate" this type of website. I don't "hate" many things in general. I take your point.
avree 3y ago
Goes to show the sad state of web UI design. Most of these sites are barely two steps removed from default bootstrap.
SiempreViernes 3y ago
Astronomical web design? This looks nothing like Simbad, HEASARC, or NED!
- malfist 3y ago
  But it is a catalog! Maybe even a new one. But probably not a new, general catalog.
  - SiempreViernes 3y ago
    That's a good point. Further deductions for not having an acronym!
Fauntleroy 3y ago
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.
andrewmcwatters 3y ago
Reminds me of Awwwards and TheFWA.
BenGuz 3y ago
I've always loved websites with great photographs and videos. Other sites feel like over-engineered PowerPoints. A few of these definitely get it right, but most of the animation-heavy ones load slow on my phone.
isomorphic- 3y ago
Ew, endless infinite scrolling. Individual pages are so much better.
- pc86 3y ago
  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.
st3ve445678 3y ago
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.
- verdverm 3y ago
  Don't Make Me Think!
stonogo 3y ago
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.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  Can you make it extra trash on mobile? You’re hired!
Unai 3y ago
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.
- hidelooktropic 3y ago
  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.
- awb 3y ago
  Here are some I like: https://pixelfika.com/pixels https://pixelfika.com/pixels https://cssline.com/ https://cssline.com/ https://www.siteinspire.com/ https://www.siteinspire.com/
  - Gualdrapo 3y ago
    Also https://minimal.gallery/ https://minimal.gallery/ (I learned about this here on HN If I recall correctly)
    - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
      [flagged]
    - hbcondo714 3y ago
      Yup, discussed here 5 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35225097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35225097
Reptur 3y ago
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.
- galaxyLogic 3y ago
  You know how Times Square was in the past: Giant neon texts which flashed on and off, in different colors. These days Times Square is all about video. Times have changed but the purpose is still the same, make you buy something.
- deltarholamda 3y ago
  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.
  - mattygee 3y ago
    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. \<thousand-yard-stare \/\>
dbingham 3y ago
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?
- no_wizard 3y ago
  The reality is in most cases, the sales of developer focused tools or services goes to management, not the devs themselves. I'm certain due to human psychology, that the more "polished" a site looks, it translates into more leads
  - doctorpangloss 3y ago
    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.
rogerthis 3y ago
An example of using "God" in vain.
airstrike 3y ago
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
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  Just find something you like and copy it. 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.
sam0x17 3y ago
Why do I feel like all of these examples are extremely difficult to navigate and just bad for UX reasons? _cries in early 2010s designs_ Like I don't want one giant page with scrolling-bound effects. Just give me the damn content.
pmcp 3y ago
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.
d-lisp 3y ago
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.
lijok 3y ago
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.
- z3ncyberpunk 3y ago
  [flagged]
chankstein38 3y ago
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. Overall 3/10 "good webdesign"
furyofantares 3y ago
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
netbioserror 3y ago
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.
r00dY 3y ago
You can design iPhones. Or you can design installation art. 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.
alexb_ 3y ago
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.
- logifail 3y ago
  > 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...
- coolliquidcode 3y ago
  I really wish W3C never got rid of the <blink> tag. It's such a minor UI offender these days.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
HungSu 3y ago
I find godly.website a helpful resource, but I also agree too many of these are design studios and are of no interest to me. Even if you set the filter to web UI, it tends to showcase the sales page and not the UI. Mobbin is probably more useful to most people: https://mobbin.com/browse/ios/apps https://mobbin.com/browse/ios/apps
rozap 3y ago
Oh the irony when I got a popup asking me to subscribe. It's a no from me.
pkkm 3y ago
Given how popular they are, these modern designs must appeal to someone, but personally I find them really bad. It's pure form over function with the huge text that reduces my 24" monitor to the information density of a phone and the annoying fade-ins that interfere with quickly skimming the page. This kind of webpage makes me immediately suspicious. I find these landing pages much better: <https://hypothesis.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://hypothesis.readthedocs.io/en/latest/>, <https://cmocka.org/ https://cmocka.org/>, <https://pytorch.org/ https://pytorch.org/>.
- JakeAl 3y ago
  Right there with you. Their focus is on smoke and mirrors, not putting content first. If the first thing I have to do to get to the content is move your interface or big pictures out of the way, you're doing it wrong.
  - moralestapia 3y ago
    Your argument (and GPs) is valid but it doesn't really belong here, as this is a "design inspiration" gallery, as opposed to a "content inspiration" or "accessibility" blog or whatever you misunderstood this to be. I got exactly what I expected to see when I clicked on the linked website.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mikojan 3y ago
  https://cmocka.org https://cmocka.org is quite the collection of contrast errors and botched accessibility properties in only one page. https://pytorch.org https://pytorch.org is not much better. Neither form nor function in my personal opinion... If I am going to be swayed that Obys' Grids[0] is bad, you better be comparing it to W3.org[1][2][3] or something.................................................. [0]: https://grids.obys.agency/ https://grids.obys.agency/ [1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-method-id/ https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-method-id/ [2]: https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/combobox/ https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/combobox/ [3]: https://www.w3.org/news/2023/draft-note-catalan-gap-analysis/ https://www.w3.org/news/2023/draft-note-catalan-gap-analysis...
rerdavies 3y ago
I intensely dislike websites that use this style. All style, and no content. It takes you 3 minutes to get to the bottom of the page; and once you do, you realize that you have about five-sentences-worth of actual information. That being said.... The New York Time is regularly running mixedia long-form journalism that intersperses scroll-bar-driven media with text. I'm not sure how much. Maybe one or two articles a week. The mixed media can be quite elaborate: animated graphs, video, diagrams with incremental annotation. I'm not entirely sold. But I can't help admiring what they're trying to do anyway. My read: that they are consciously trying to create a new vocabulary for presenting text-based information on the web. The general style is as follows: four or five paragraphs of text, and as you scroll down, you encounter islands of animated media that are driven by scrolling. An example: a series of pictures, with annotations that appear sequentially explaining what your seeing. Or a graph, again with sequentially appearing graphs and annotations. Some articles are more successful than others; but I will grudgingly admit that most of the animation sequences are worth about 1400 words. Compare that to the web mockups on that page, where an entire website is worth about 36 words.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
codemonkey-zeta 3y ago
Meta comment, but godly.website itself is a very well-executed web app. Super snappy site here.
whalesalad 3y ago
I really miss the old css zen garden style websites. It was such a rush to have your site featured on one of those. At one point my bud and I were going to revive cssthesis.com but were kinda swamped with startup life at the time and couldn't make the time for it.
neoCrimeLabs 3y ago
What was the criteria used to determine these were good web design? Also, how is a website that only provides links/QR code to the mobile app store a good web design? That is the antithesis of good web design as it literally tells all users to not use their web site without providing any information what so ever.
neilk 3y ago
I appreciate design that stretches boundaries. But, assembled all together, most of these felt the same. I got numb. A big sans-serif claim, gradient-colored text, sometimes a big 3-D toy to fumble about with since there is no other content on the page. The really edgy designs disrupted their own typography with scrolling elements. Cool, but... what's the point? Robert Bringhurst once said "Design exists to honor content." That may be too conservative, as there is a place for design for its own sake. But few of these sites had anything to say other than "look at me!"
i-use-nixos-btw 3y ago
This stuff reminds me of the days when it was trendy to put a swingy ball that follows the cursor. It’s technically cool (as in “hmm how did they do that?”) but it adds little to the experience aside from concentrated cringe. I absolutely do not want animations that emerge when scrolling down a page. Im scrolling because I want a linear view of things, and the silly animations take away my control of the experience.

223 points by spansoa 3y ago

jxf 3y ago

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.

ben_w 3y ago
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. Glossy isn't my cup of tea.
- galaxyLogic 3y ago
  These are basically all ads for something. It is like with TV-ads they are "glossy" in their own way, trying to catch the attention to sell something.
- asteroidz 3y ago
  This has always been my feeling about the well-known https://www.awwwards.com/ https://www.awwwards.com/ Would be lying though to say I wasn't inspired by some of the sites they showcase.
sitzkrieg 3y ago
yea this appears to be biased towards design and ui , maybe not even ux on some of the busy ones
Savely 3y ago
Agree. Most of the presented sites are too dynamic for my taste, I don’t like when something on a page moves purposelessly.
lotsofpizza 3y ago
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.
- galaxyLogic 3y ago
  Why don't they load the CSS first, then HTML, then scripts?
  - FridgeSeal 3y ago
    “Who cares about performance, if our users cared about performance they’d tell us” - PM’s everywhere.

butz 3y ago

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.

gpderetta 3y ago
Well, lucky you, I only see an endless list of spinners.

DiggyJohnson 3y ago

This will be a fun conversation. 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.

bee_rider 3y ago
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.
- DiggyJohnson 3y ago
  I certainly don't "hate" this type of website. I don't "hate" many things in general. I take your point.

avree 3y ago

Goes to show the sad state of web UI design. Most of these sites are barely two steps removed from default bootstrap.

SiempreViernes 3y ago

Astronomical web design? This looks nothing like Simbad, HEASARC, or NED!

malfist 3y ago
But it is a catalog! Maybe even a new one. But probably not a new, general catalog.
- SiempreViernes 3y ago
  That's a good point. Further deductions for not having an acronym!

Fauntleroy 3y ago

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.

andrewmcwatters 3y ago

Reminds me of Awwwards and TheFWA.

BenGuz 3y ago

I've always loved websites with great photographs and videos. Other sites feel like over-engineered PowerPoints. A few of these definitely get it right, but most of the animation-heavy ones load slow on my phone.

isomorphic- 3y ago

Ew, endless infinite scrolling. Individual pages are so much better.

pc86 3y ago
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.

st3ve445678 3y ago

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.

verdverm 3y ago
Don't Make Me Think!

stonogo 3y ago

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.

SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
Can you make it extra trash on mobile? You’re hired!

Unai 3y ago

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.

hidelooktropic 3y ago
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.
awb 3y ago
Here are some I like: https://pixelfika.com/pixels https://pixelfika.com/pixels https://cssline.com/ https://cssline.com/ https://www.siteinspire.com/ https://www.siteinspire.com/
- Gualdrapo 3y ago
  Also https://minimal.gallery/ https://minimal.gallery/ (I learned about this here on HN If I recall correctly)
  - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - hbcondo714 3y ago
    Yup, discussed here 5 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35225097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35225097

Reptur 3y ago

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.

galaxyLogic 3y ago
You know how Times Square was in the past: Giant neon texts which flashed on and off, in different colors. These days Times Square is all about video. Times have changed but the purpose is still the same, make you buy something.
deltarholamda 3y ago
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.
- mattygee 3y ago
  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. \<thousand-yard-stare \/\>

dbingham 3y ago

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?

no_wizard 3y ago
The reality is in most cases, the sales of developer focused tools or services goes to management, not the devs themselves. I'm certain due to human psychology, that the more "polished" a site looks, it translates into more leads
- doctorpangloss 3y ago
  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.

rogerthis 3y ago

An example of using "God" in vain.

airstrike 3y ago

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

nonethewiser 3y ago
Just find something you like and copy it. 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.

sam0x17 3y ago

Why do I feel like all of these examples are extremely difficult to navigate and just bad for UX reasons? _cries in early 2010s designs_ Like I don't want one giant page with scrolling-bound effects. Just give me the damn content.

pmcp 3y ago

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.

d-lisp 3y ago

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.

lijok 3y ago

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.

z3ncyberpunk 3y ago
[flagged]

chankstein38 3y ago

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. Overall 3/10 "good webdesign"

furyofantares 3y ago

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

netbioserror 3y ago

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.

r00dY 3y ago

You can design iPhones. Or you can design installation art. 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.

alexb_ 3y ago

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.

logifail 3y ago
> 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...
coolliquidcode 3y ago
I really wish W3C never got rid of the <blink> tag. It's such a minor UI offender these days.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

HungSu 3y ago

I find godly.website a helpful resource, but I also agree too many of these are design studios and are of no interest to me. Even if you set the filter to web UI, it tends to showcase the sales page and not the UI. Mobbin is probably more useful to most people: https://mobbin.com/browse/ios/apps https://mobbin.com/browse/ios/apps

rozap 3y ago

Oh the irony when I got a popup asking me to subscribe. It's a no from me.

pkkm 3y ago

Given how popular they are, these modern designs must appeal to someone, but personally I find them really bad. It's pure form over function with the huge text that reduces my 24" monitor to the information density of a phone and the annoying fade-ins that interfere with quickly skimming the page. This kind of webpage makes me immediately suspicious. I find these landing pages much better: <https://hypothesis.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://hypothesis.readthedocs.io/en/latest/>, <https://cmocka.org/ https://cmocka.org/>, <https://pytorch.org/ https://pytorch.org/>.

JakeAl 3y ago
Right there with you. Their focus is on smoke and mirrors, not putting content first. If the first thing I have to do to get to the content is move your interface or big pictures out of the way, you're doing it wrong.
- moralestapia 3y ago
  Your argument (and GPs) is valid but it doesn't really belong here, as this is a "design inspiration" gallery, as opposed to a "content inspiration" or "accessibility" blog or whatever you misunderstood this to be. I got exactly what I expected to see when I clicked on the linked website.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mikojan 3y ago
https://cmocka.org https://cmocka.org is quite the collection of contrast errors and botched accessibility properties in only one page. https://pytorch.org https://pytorch.org is not much better. Neither form nor function in my personal opinion... If I am going to be swayed that Obys' Grids[0] is bad, you better be comparing it to W3.org[1][2][3] or something.................................................. [0]: https://grids.obys.agency/ https://grids.obys.agency/ [1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-method-id/ https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-method-id/ [2]: https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/combobox/ https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/combobox/ [3]: https://www.w3.org/news/2023/draft-note-catalan-gap-analysis/ https://www.w3.org/news/2023/draft-note-catalan-gap-analysis...

rerdavies 3y ago

I intensely dislike websites that use this style. All style, and no content. It takes you 3 minutes to get to the bottom of the page; and once you do, you realize that you have about five-sentences-worth of actual information. That being said.... The New York Time is regularly running mixedia long-form journalism that intersperses scroll-bar-driven media with text. I'm not sure how much. Maybe one or two articles a week. The mixed media can be quite elaborate: animated graphs, video, diagrams with incremental annotation. I'm not entirely sold. But I can't help admiring what they're trying to do anyway. My read: that they are consciously trying to create a new vocabulary for presenting text-based information on the web. The general style is as follows: four or five paragraphs of text, and as you scroll down, you encounter islands of animated media that are driven by scrolling. An example: a series of pictures, with annotations that appear sequentially explaining what your seeing. Or a graph, again with sequentially appearing graphs and annotations. Some articles are more successful than others; but I will grudgingly admit that most of the animation sequences are worth about 1400 words. Compare that to the web mockups on that page, where an entire website is worth about 36 words.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

codemonkey-zeta 3y ago

Meta comment, but godly.website itself is a very well-executed web app. Super snappy site here.

whalesalad 3y ago

I really miss the old css zen garden style websites. It was such a rush to have your site featured on one of those. At one point my bud and I were going to revive cssthesis.com but were kinda swamped with startup life at the time and couldn't make the time for it.

neoCrimeLabs 3y ago

What was the criteria used to determine these were good web design? Also, how is a website that only provides links/QR code to the mobile app store a good web design? That is the antithesis of good web design as it literally tells all users to not use their web site without providing any information what so ever.

neilk 3y ago

I appreciate design that stretches boundaries. But, assembled all together, most of these felt the same. I got numb. A big sans-serif claim, gradient-colored text, sometimes a big 3-D toy to fumble about with since there is no other content on the page. The really edgy designs disrupted their own typography with scrolling elements. Cool, but... what's the point? Robert Bringhurst once said "Design exists to honor content." That may be too conservative, as there is a place for design for its own sake. But few of these sites had anything to say other than "look at me!"

i-use-nixos-btw 3y ago

This stuff reminds me of the days when it was trendy to put a swingy ball that follows the cursor. It’s technically cool (as in “hmm how did they do that?”) but it adds little to the experience aside from concentrated cringe. I absolutely do not want animations that emerge when scrolling down a page. Im scrolling because I want a linear view of things, and the silly animations take away my control of the experience.