Just putting this out there for those who are not in the know. This type of crisis is easily avoidable.
I'm old-school. :)
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!)
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Buttons_(1962_film)
The buttons (at 2:25) : https://youtu.be/O5StEEzpT04?t=145
At the very worst (which is what I did), make up a simple image in Adobe with a 3D effect, save it as a black-and-white bitmap, change the white to the color of the button. The make a second version in the same manner, but this time the shading of the button reversed.
Nexty setup the HTML so the on-press for the link pulled up the alternate button image. The reversed shading (when done properly) then looked like it was depressed.
Is that so much harder than adding the JavaScript and other code around it to make the simple animation some sites have? (At least with the on-press option, it didn’t require having JavaScript active just to animate some buttons.)
https://getbootstrap.com/1.0.0/
They may have peaked with 2.0:
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
Maybe something like tvtropes.com, but for web application design, and of course with visual examples.
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.
I reported it to the FBI but still no response from them. This shit is serious guys and when will it end?
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.
In other news, though, I believe the HN button is just an HTML button, with a touch of font styling on it from HN. Linux on a Chrome-descended browser I'm just getting a grey box with a black outline, no 3D styling. It's not styled that way by HN. Everything else in the CSS properties for me is showing as "user agent stylesheet", e.g., the defaults.
there are others i think
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.
Update: The Pixel Perfect checkbox makes a noticeable difference in appearance. I presume this is because older systems were developed before the advent of anti-aliasing, and were designed pixel by pixel.
Introducing Mac OS X's Aqua interface, Steve Jobs said at Macworld in January 2000: "We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them."
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.
No wonder OSX felt like the future.
I miss the future.
It would be cool if you could steal them but that would probably be bad.
I'd say the same for the scrollbars, but these days I'd settle for reverting to them being visible at all times.
And if you really wanted to, maybe made some concessions, and were clever about it, you could maybe find a way so that users define shapes and functionality and a default light/dark color scheme, but applications could still use the "user style" with their own color scheme, and allow the user to switch between that and the user defined colors.
It would also have the side effect of ejecting the people who just change things to make their mark. There is no more mark to make! Except making the "style configurator" for the user better, collaborating on expanding the protocol shared between it and websites/applications. You can invent a new type of button, put it on the pile, and hope it becomes one of the higher rated ones that gets downloaded and used a lot, on any OS, in any application or website. That will be a lot less interesting for hack frauds, and software interfaces can finally become awesome and then just better from there.