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Stolen Buttons
- wuhhh 3mo agoI can’t look, so many arrows poorly aligned with text - how can these developers live with themselves!
- Aardwolf 3mo agoWhat is one to do? Unicode has dozens of arrows for each direction, but each of them has its height compared to the text rendered differently depending on font or platform
- matteason 3mo agoThey're usually done with SVGs or CSS pseudoelements (a clip-path polygon or borders and rotation) rather than Unicode arrows
- wuhhh 3mo agoExactly, text content goes in a <span>, icon is an <svg>, flex align items center on the wrapper gets you close, nudge the icon to perfection with transform: translate
- reaperducer 3mo agoAnd then the line wraps.
- wuhhh 3mo agoAlright I’ll take the bait, flex shrink none on the svg, white space no wrap on the text
- thomasfl 3mo agoSo many different looking buttons. Wish there were more standards.
- echelon 3mo agoIt's called design and thank god everything isn't the same. Gtk has some nice standard looking buttons for you. You know how those look, and I'm pretty sure you don't want that. Think to when "UI experts" impose edicts from top down, such as "flat design" or "material". Are you really happy about that? The fact that we're even looking in awe at this list is amazing. If everything were the same, this wouldn't even be interesting. This is fun and we need more of it in the world.
- drdaeman 3mo agoLack of consistent system-wide UI and UX was my biggest gripe with GNU/Linux/X11 back in the day (‘90s, pre-Winamp era, other OSes had most apps with uniform look-and-feel) while I still cared about things like that.
- dandellion 3mo agoThere are only like three or four that aren't just flat buttons with a different border radius and colour. If this had been done in the mid 2000s it would have hundreds of entirely different looking buttons. Glassy buttons, metal buttons, glowing buttons, pixel art buttons, cartoon buttons, etc.
- echelon 3mo agoA better time. Before flat material lameness and Corporate Memphis.
- dev1ycan 3mo agoYeah, let's take the remaining fun out of the web, everything needs to be gray and plain.
- hmokiguess 3mo agoYou should deduplicate and offer a cluster view with similarity distance
- Retr0id 3mo agoInteresting choice to hotlink all the images! The side-effect is that some are dead now.
- aghilmort 3mo agothis is really great like collecting bottle caps except is buttons
- Waterluvian 3mo agoIs this as easy as calling getComputedStyle on a target element or is there more to it? I love the idea and I want to experiment with automating similar.
- Gecko4072 3mo agohttps://anatolyzenkov.com/stolen-buttons/button-stealer https://anatolyzenkov.com/stolen-buttons/button-stealer
- Waterluvian 3mo agoThanks. Gah I feel blind. I went back and it’s right there at the top
- Gecko4072 3mo agoHa there were a few buttons on the page that might’ve been distracting lol
- senfiaj 3mo agoYes, but how does it decide if an element is button? Some are links (<a> tags).
- binaryturtle 3mo agoI may have missed one by looking at this huge dump, but NONE of the "buttons" I saw there actually looked/felt like a button. Something I can feel that I press it down and it gives proper visual feedback, like a little 3D effect. I'm old-school. :)
- QuantumNomad_ 3mo agoI see a couple that look like buttons to me, like a yellow Donate button and a green Learn More button. I agree that most of the other ones don’t look very button like to me either. But even so I would probably understand that most of them were buttons when I saw them in context on a page. The flat style has been around for a while now, so I’ve gotten used to it even though when I started using computers it was on Windows 95 with the grey rectangular buttons with shaded sides that give them the “3d effect”. And even flat style buttons often have changes when you hover and click, but it seems that they didn’t copy that part on this button collection page.
- harpiaharpyja 3mo agoThey didn't copy any hold/hover states which is too bad, those are an integral part of a button IMO
- nielssp 3mo agoYou might like this: https://nielssp.dk/guis/buttons https://nielssp.dk/guis/buttons
- binaryturtle 3mo agoA few really nice buttons there, indeed. :)
- reaperducer 3mo agoSo interesting to see the contrast between OSX and Windows in 2001. No wonder OSX felt like the future. I miss the future.
- input_sh 3mo agoToo bad they're just static, as the website doesn't copy the hover state or the on-click animations.
- dorianmariecom 3mo ago:hover and :focus there are others i think
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- hedora 3mo agoI can't be the only one that tried clicking them to see what they did. ("Where does this 'login' button go?")
- finger 3mo agoIt would be interesting if it was possible to sort them by similarity, width, height, shape, color, etc.
- amelius 3mo agoFor inspiration, I prefer this one: https://uiverse.io/buttons https://uiverse.io/buttons
- anon7000 3mo agoI don’t think it’s for animation, it’s to collect all the different buttons seen in the wild
- Gualdrapo 3mo agohttps://uiverse.io/GreyD097/great-rat-93 https://uiverse.io/GreyD097/great-rat-93 wow
- reaperducer 3mo agoThat's the only interesting one. The rest are a snoozefest of corporate mediocrity.
- busymom0 3mo agoDoesn't work for me at all on iOS Safari?
- jstanley 3mo agoIs it just me or are these almost all terrible? Almost all of them are animated, move when hovered, move when clicked, or sometimes all three. Just awful. LLMs keep making buttons like this and I keep telling them not to.
- Jaxan 3mo agoOh this reminds me that we used to create buttons for navigation in flash!
- pmdr 3mo agoIs there something similar, but for menus?
- firasd 3mo agoThis is like the late 80s/early 90s cyberspace idea... Imagine you're walking through a 3D ramp and all these buttons are yelling at you from all over the atmosphere... Login here! Start here! Contact us...
- codewiththiha 3mo agoSo this is basically the Thanos of web devs
- iefbr14 3mo agoIt reminds me a bit of the toolbar mania in the nineties :)
- thih9 3mo agoI wish there was a way to exclude the plain ones (single color rectangle with rounded corners and text).
- dozerly 3mo agoIt would be cool to classify and categorize them so you could filter by attributes
- 0x1ceb00da 3mo agoYoink
- JSR_FDED 3mo agoSurprising how not one of these made my heart beat faster.
- michaelt 3mo agoNone of them push your buttons, huh?
- ninjahawk1 3mo agoVery nice. Now let’s see Paul Allen’s buttons
- pmdr 3mo agoHaha, there was a post about 98.css the other day, I'm pretty sure it's one of those.
- modzu 3mo agonone of them work
- sshasan 3mo agoOh wow! Curious if you have the collection indexed by the year/month you picked it. Would love to see how button designs and types have changed over the years.
- jonathrg 3mo agoThat's rude. Give them back
- sodapopcan 3mo agoThis is good comedy. I'm disappointed (annoyed, even) it's not the top comment.
- bnj 3mo agoGreat, how are we supposed to use those websites now? No wonder web is breaking down
- t-sauer 3mo ago610 buttons are anchor elements, and only 285 are actually real buttons.
- a1o 3mo agoAre we in flat design for way too long or is this a recent idea and the collection is also very recent?
- layer8 3mo agoIt’s definitely been too long, since around 15 years ago.
- donohoe 3mo agoI have noticed on occasion websites with a missing button. Now I know what happened. Finally, closure.
- dmd 3mo agoYou wouldn’t download a button
- hedora 3mo agoTime to sail the high seas. Sometimes I think it'd be great if that was how the internet actually worked.
- cr125rider 3mo agoOh no! Every web button I’ve ever seen, technically I’ve downloaded it!
- noisy_boy 3mo agoAll is not lost. Congratulations on taking the first step by acknowledgeing your mistake. Surrender and return the buttons and we will wipe your record clean.
- leoc 3mo agoThe legend of the Button-Eater who comes out from his lair somewhere deep inside the Web.
- NooneAtAll3 3mo ago"average person steals 3 buttons a year" factoid actualy just statistical error. average person steals 0 buttons per year. Button-eater Ben, who lives in data server & steals over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
- chrisweekly 3mo ago
- joncooper 3mo agoYou made my day. What a joyful, weird, fun projec!
- nate 3mo agofor sure. every day i come here hoping for something like this. something like the old milliondollarhomepage kind of things. i miss that stuff :)
- khazhoux 3mo agoCan anyone comment on the legality of this? By the number I see, this would no longer be classified as simple possession, but likely as intent to distribute.
- armchairhacker 3mo agoYou're visiting boring websites. I only saw one barely skeuomorphic button
- nine_k 3mo agoSo few of them look clickable.
- culi 3mo agoButton components across major component galleries: https://component.gallery/components/button/ https://component.gallery/components/button/
- jsrcout 3mo agoInteresting site. As a non-Web developer, I've vaguely wondered about the various frameworks and where the "look and feel" that I see on different sites' user controls come from. This be will fun to explore.
- moritzwarhier 3mo agoWhat a lovely idea. I hope there will be some kind of online museum of web design trends before the web turns into something else, and maybe paradigms such as "buttons" will stop being as interesting any more. I guess I should Jetzt loslegen just like the site's author :D Maybe something like tvtropes.com, but for web application design, and of course with visual examples.
- leoc 3mo agoIt would be lovely to see some of those converted into enamelled metal badges.
- gkoberger 3mo agoThere's a Chrome Extension he made based on this: https://anatolyzenkov.com/stolen-buttons/button-stealer https://anatolyzenkov.com/stolen-buttons/button-stealer I used it for a bit until I realized... I probably didn't want a third party reading all my traffic. But I did like having it for a bit. (It is linked from the page, but given how the whole page is CTAs... it's hard to notice!)
- moontear 3mo agoWhy I third party? Aren’t the stolen buttons stored locally?
- altcognito 3mo agoI think due to the nature of extensions.
- cube00 3mo agoThey might be today but who's to say it won't start firing off fetch calls later perhaps under a new owner if it gets sold. Unfortunately the browser extension permissions are not granular enough to warn you when fetch is being used in an extension. As an example, my password manager extension can read and inject content into any page along with communicating with its server to sync my vault. These are the only permissions Firefox shows me: * Access your data for all websites * Get data from the clipboard * Input data to the clipboard * Display notifications to you * Access browser tabs * Access browser activity during navigation No indication there that it can also communicate with its server.
- DonHopkins 3mo agoHe's as obsessed with buttons as "Mr. Lossoff" the "Button Man" in "A Nero Wolfe Mystery” episode “The Mother Hunt”, where Archie drops in on "Mister Lossoff’s Distinguished Buttons” in the garment district of New York: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-QgWOSVKm4&t=724s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-QgWOSVKm4&t=724s
- nalekberov 3mo agoPeople will do any useless thing to self-promote.
- pmdr 3mo agoWell, it is somewhat entertaining.
- karim79 3mo agoI had my button stolen but it's not in this inventory. The perpetrator is still out there somewhere parading it or selling it on the black market. I'm still losing sleep over it. I lost my job, wife and car. Still praying for justice to be served one day. I reported it to the FBI but still no response from them. This shit is serious guys and when will it end?
- internet2000 3mo ago10000 buttons and not a single engaging Call To Action
- karim79 3mo agoIf you blockchain your buttons they are much harder to steal. Just putting this out there for those who are not in the know. This type of crisis is easily avoidable.
- mlok 3mo agoFunny, it reminds me of War Of The Buttons, a famous French movie from 1962, where kids would cut out buttons from their enemies as a war trophy, and stash them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Buttons_(1962_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Buttons_(1962_film) The buttons (at 2:25) : https://youtu.be/O5StEEzpT04?t=145 https://youtu.be/O5StEEzpT04?t=145
- theendisney 3mo agoIm blown away by how ugly they all are. The worse part is that this is what users expect now. If you so much as put an icon on the corner they cant find the button anymore.
- ramijames 3mo agoI'm sad that buttons are no longer interesting.
- EarlKing 3mo agoI suppose this is a healthier hobby than stealing hotel towels and ashtrays.
- Dwedit 3mo agoCareful you might run afoul of the infinite scrolling laws.
- qainsights 3mo agowhy stealing :) buttons are either circle, rectangle, or rounded rectangle :)
- jonhohle 3mo agoThey used to be beveled or capsule shaped, after they were 2D.
- LeoPanthera 3mo agoWhen did we stop making buttons that actually look like a button? The bas-relief era of UI design now feels like a golden era, and the early "Aqua" versions of Mac OS X the ultimate evolution. Everything since then feels like we're regressing. The "add comment" button for this comment is literally a solid blue roundrect. It's not even obvious that it's clickable.
- dymk 3mo agoWhat a button look like to you? Blue roundrect sure says button to me.
- hollowturtle 3mo agoBecause you never saw a button in your life
- fian 3mo agoThat could be a real experience for children in the not too distant future. We are seeing more and more appliances coming out with less buttons and a mobile app to access advanced features. Also cars (annoyingly) are coming out with more physical controls replaced by touchscreen interfaces. It's not hard to imagine a world without physical buttons becoming a reality. The days of digital buttons might also be numbered. Apps designed for touched enabled interfaces, particularly on mobiles, support swipes and gestures to perform different actions. There is no obvious indication you can perform an action with a swipe or gesture. Having grown up pre-internet with physical buttons, dials, sliders etc I automatically look for the digital equivalent for interaction, I don't assume I can swipe or gesture to do something. I have to resort to searching for "how do I do x with y" to find out. Children on the other hand spend a lot of time playing with new things. they are far more likely to discover swipe or gesture through play. As an adult I am much more task oriented, I'm not looking to play I'm looking to get the thing done. As children grow up in a world without physical buttons, they may not see the relevance of digital equivalents and lean towards swipe, gesture, voice control etc. Digital buttons may disappear. An example of an similar technological shift happened for many pre-Boomers with the introduction of Video Cassette Recorders (VCRs). My father grew up with analog clocks and watches. Time was told by two or three hands on a clock face. When VCRs became more affordable in the 80s they came with digital clocks. He could read the time off the digital display but couldn't make the leap to setting a recording time by putting it into program mode then using buttons to set a record start time and duration. To him, time was set by moving the clock hands or twisting a watch dial. The introduction of flat-UI bothered me in it threw away a visual indication that this "thing" is a clickable button. I obviously not fully adapted to swipes and gestures. I feel like a few steps down the path for whatever the future equivalent of "can't program the VCR" is. I hope the advent of LLMs will make it easy enough for application developers to produce multiple UIs for different classes of user button users, swipe users, whatever the next thing is (brain wave control??).
- Cider9986 3mo agoYou can't steal buttons.
- mito88 3mo agoREJECT ALL
- tech_jabroni 3mo agoMEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES SUBJECT: Adversarial Distillation of Frontier UI Buttons The United States leads the world in user interface (UI) technologies. That lead reflects decades of foundational design research, bold aesthetic risk-taking, and millions of hours of front-end development. Our button leadership drives click-through rates, strengthens conversion funnels, and advances the frontiers of e-commerce, digital art, and human-computer interaction. The interactive breakthroughs emerging from original designers raise aesthetic standards, expand interactivity, and improve user experiences around the world. However, we have information indicating that a specific actor, principally based in Hamburg, Germany—operating under the name Anatoly Zenkov—is engaged in a deliberate, industrial-scale campaign to distill frontier UI buttons. Leveraging inspect-element developer tools to bypass basic DOM protections and using extraction techniques to expose proprietary CSS and SVG information, this coordinated campaign systematically extracts hover states and active properties from target websites, exploiting U.S. design expertise and innovation. Buttons developed from surreptitious, unauthorized distillation campaigns like this do not replicate the full performance of the original. They do, however, enable this actor to release consolidated web galleries that appear to perform comparably on select hover-state benchmarks at a fraction of the design cost. These distillation campaigns also allow the actor to deliberately strip functional JavaScript from the resulting buttons and undo mechanisms that ensure those UI elements actually submit forms, navigate pages, or add items to a shopping cart. We remain committed to the free and fair development of web technologies across a competitive ecosystem, from leading frontier design systems to highly tuned CSS libraries, and from open-source frameworks to open-component models. UI distillation, when legitimately used via tutorials or CodePens to produce smaller, lighter-weight components from more advanced systems, is a vital part of that ecosystem. Industrial button-theft activities that aim to systematically undermine original designers are not. There is nothing innovative about systematically extracting and copying the CSS of the design industry, and there is nothing open about supposedly open button galleries that are derived from acts of malicious UI exploitation. As methods to detect and mitigate industrial-scale element extraction grow more sophisticated, individuals in Hamburg who build their portfolios on such fragile foundations should have little confidence in the integrity and reliability of the buttons they produce.
- 3mo ago
- gzalo 3mo agoI also collect old Flash buttons from my archived version of flashkit: https://flashkitty.gzalo.com/Interfaces/Buttons/ https://flashkitty.gzalo.com/Interfaces/Buttons/
- boveyking 3mo agoI am so lucky, this guy only stole 2 "Yes" button from my Claude Code terminal. I still have enough "Yes" buttons to complete my grand project.
- sajithdilshan 3mo agoThat’s very autistic German of him to do that
- zahrevsky 3mo agoPrevious design of editing mode was better :-( Current design shows them as a list, which requires you to scroll a lot to go through all the items.
- 1zael 3mo agoBrad Woods has an amazing website dynamically illustrating the concept of "juice", which he defines as "the non-essential visual, audio and haptic effects that enhance the player's experience". There's an example of how you can juice up a simple "delete" button with various levels of UX. I encourage you to play around with it to juice up your own buttons! Source: https://garden.bradwoods.io/notes/design/juice https://garden.bradwoods.io/notes/design/juice
- chrisweekly 3mo agoYes! Awesome site and post, I'd forgotten about it. Thanks for sharing!
- sponno 3mo agoamazing - that’s a great link. loved reading this.
- brettpro 3mo agoAt times I couldn't tell if this was a lament or an instruction manual. The "souled" version of the Clif Bar site and the Amazon Video pause menu are good examples of the pendulum perhaps swinging back . Even today they give "overbusy" more than "rewarding."
- dredmorbius 3mo agoMissed Rick-roll opportunity... That said, the hover/push feedback instantly reminded me of my own "Motherfucking Website" variant and the effects I give ordinary hyperlinks (an on-hover and on-click interaction, via CSS). <https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/pen/KpMqqB https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/pen/KpMqqB>
- Abh1Works 3mo agoHIs personal website is a treat to look at
- nee_oo_ru 3mo agosimply wonderful.
- kiriberty 3mo agoIs this a new kind of ransomware? Company> Where has my button gone? Our website it broken Anatoly Zenkov> Buha ha ha... I got your buttons! Company> What do you want? Give my button back, pls. Anatoly Zenkov> I need 1 billion dollars. Muh ha ha. Since you said pls, I'll give 10% friends & family discount.