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donohoe 4 hours ago [-]
I have noticed on occasion websites with a missing button. Now I know what happened. Finally, closure.
dmd 3 hours ago [-]
You wouldn’t download a button
leoc 2 hours ago [-]
The legend of the Button-Eater who comes out from his lair somewhere deep inside the Web.
LeoPanthera 60 minutes ago [-]
When 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.
dan_linder 17 minutes ago [-]
And producing them was very easy even in the pre-CSS days.
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.)
jerf 44 minutes ago [-]
Even better, how about those capacitive buttons that look like computer buttons in the real world, only even less visually distinct, and have absolutely no force feedback, depressing motion, or any other feedback whatsoever that you've pressed an actual button?
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.
dymk 53 minutes ago [-]
What a button look like to you? Blue roundrect sure says button to me.
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 2 hours ago [-]
Why I third party? Aren’t the stolen buttons stored locally?
altcognito 2 hours ago [-]
I think due to the nature of extensions.
binaryturtle 7 hours ago [-]
I 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 have always felt that the button in the last couple version of Windows was a bit off. This page confirms it: Old school buttons used to stay in a "selected" state after being pressed, but that was not implemented in Windows 8's new UI.
jsrcout 3 hours ago [-]
Ooh, nice! This very much appeals to the historian and former GUI developer in me.
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.
phatskat 2 hours ago [-]
I really enjoyed Motif and the general flat clean look that came with eg TWM and co. I do have a soft spot for the candy Mac styles, and win2k is still my favorite windows release
Exoristos 24 minutes ago [-]
KDE 3.1 *chef's kiss*
jprd 3 hours ago [-]
Oh wow, that was so cathartic. Thank you for sharing.
hmry 39 minutes ago [-]
Awesome, the Haiku one is my favorite
makapuf 26 minutes ago [-]
Indeed, 2000s are my fav globally
binaryturtle 5 hours ago [-]
A few really nice buttons there, indeed. :)
Kuyawa 5 hours ago [-]
Ubuntu 2020 wins, only one dark themed
inigyou 4 hours ago [-]
Dark themes are for people who can't lower their screen brightness.
reaperducer 5 hours ago [-]
So interesting to see the contrast between OSX and Windows in 2001.
No wonder OSX felt like the future.
I miss the future.
bhaak 4 hours ago [-]
For me the 2001 OSX looks wishy washy and does not have a professional look.
RattlesnakeJake 4 hours ago [-]
Conversely, I want those old candy Aqua buttons back. They were kitschy, but I loved them.
I'd say the same for the scrollbars, but these days I'd settle for reverting to them being visible at all times.
customguy 4 hours ago [-]
I believe in the KDE / Magic User Interface way, users should decide what they want a button or a checkbox etc. to look like, and then everything should conform to that.
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.
luismedel 1 hours ago [-]
For me, Windows 3.x era buttons are the pinnacle of buttons.
Exactly, and more broadly ALL of them are a variation of bgcolor + border-radius + padding + font (type, size). No funky shape, borders, FX, 3D / relief or even shadow, pixels... Every single one is a flat, round borders.
QuantumNomad_ 6 hours ago [-]
I 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 6 hours ago [-]
They didn't copy any hold/hover states which is too bad, those are an integral part of a button IMO
It sounds like you're talking about the "gloss" era with "juicy" buttons, which some people are retroactively referring to as Frutiger Aero. Yes, things definitely look more 3D in that design. It's currently considered out of mainstream fashion, which explains the lack. Will it resurge?
Enter "Lickable Pixels" -- the phrase that described the Aqua era.
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."
Interesting 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.
karim79 2 hours ago [-]
If 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.
That's the only interesting one. The rest are a snoozefest of corporate mediocrity.
Jaxan 4 hours ago [-]
Oh this reminds me that we used to create buttons for navigation in flash!
pmdr 2 hours ago [-]
Is there something similar, but for menus?
anon7000 6 hours ago [-]
I don’t think it’s for animation, it’s to collect all the different buttons seen in the wild
jstanley 6 hours ago [-]
Is 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.
mlok 2 hours ago [-]
Funny, 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.
Surprising how not one of these made my heart beat faster.
michaelt 5 hours ago [-]
None of them push your buttons, huh?
jonathrg 5 hours ago [-]
That's rude. Give them back
Dwedit 1 hours ago [-]
Careful you might run afoul of the infinite scrolling laws.
theendisney 1 hours ago [-]
Im 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 1 hours ago [-]
I'm sad that buttons are no longer interesting.
thih9 5 hours ago [-]
I wish there was a way to exclude the plain ones (single color rectangle with rounded corners and text).
dozerly 3 hours ago [-]
It would be cool to classify and categorize them so you could filter by attributes
moritzwarhier 3 hours ago [-]
What 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.
karim79 2 hours ago [-]
I 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 2 hours ago [-]
10000 buttons and not a single engaging Call To Action
leoc 3 hours ago [-]
It would be lovely to see some of those converted into enamelled metal badges.
wuhhh 7 hours ago [-]
I can’t look, so many arrows poorly aligned with text - how can these developers live with themselves!
Aardwolf 7 hours ago [-]
What 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 7 hours ago [-]
They're usually done with SVGs or CSS pseudoelements (a clip-path polygon or borders and rotation) rather than Unicode arrows
wuhhh 6 hours ago [-]
Exactly, 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 5 hours ago [-]
And then the line wraps.
wuhhh 5 hours ago [-]
Alright I’ll take the bait, flex shrink none on the svg, white space no wrap on the text
mito88 24 minutes ago [-]
REJECT ALL
a1o 4 hours ago [-]
Are we in flat design for way too long or is this a recent idea and the collection is also very recent?
layer8 2 hours ago [-]
It’s definitely been too long, since around 15 years ago.
Waterluvian 7 hours ago [-]
Is 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.
Thanks. Gah I feel blind. I went back and it’s right there at the top
Gecko4072 6 hours ago [-]
Ha there were a few buttons on the page that might’ve been distracting lol
qainsights 1 hours ago [-]
why stealing :) buttons are either circle, rectangle, or rounded rectangle :)
jonhohle 58 minutes ago [-]
They used to be beveled or capsule shaped, after they were 2D.
t-sauer 4 hours ago [-]
610 buttons are anchor elements, and only 285 are actually real buttons.
finger 6 hours ago [-]
It would be interesting if it was possible to sort them by similarity, width, height, shape, color, etc.
sshasan 5 hours ago [-]
Oh 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.
Retr0id 7 hours ago [-]
Interesting choice to hotlink all the images! The side-effect is that some are dead now.
hmokiguess 7 hours ago [-]
You should deduplicate and offer a cluster view with similarity distance
armchairhacker 4 hours ago [-]
You're visiting boring websites. I only saw one barely skeuomorphic button
bnj 4 hours ago [-]
Great, how are we supposed to use those websites now? No wonder web is breaking down
Cider9986 55 minutes ago [-]
You can't steal buttons.
bashtoni 54 minutes ago [-]
How do you explain this website containing all the stolen buttons then?
Cider9986 35 minutes ago [-]
They are cloned. Stealing takes the original away.
It would be cool if you could steal them but that would probably be bad.
joncooper 4 hours ago [-]
You made my day. What a joyful, weird, fun projec!
nate 4 hours ago [-]
for sure. every day i come here hoping for something like this. something like the old milliondollarhomepage kind of things. i miss that stuff :)
EarlKing 1 hours ago [-]
I suppose this is a healthier hobby than stealing hotel towels and ashtrays.
iefbr14 5 hours ago [-]
It reminds me a bit of the toolbar mania in the nineties :)
aghilmort 7 hours ago [-]
this is really great like collecting bottle caps except is buttons
nine_k 4 hours ago [-]
So few of them look clickable.
thomasfl 7 hours ago [-]
So many different looking buttons. Wish there were more standards.
dandellion 7 hours ago [-]
There 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 7 hours ago [-]
A better time. Before flat material lameness and Corporate Memphis.
dev1ycan 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah, let's take the remaining fun out of the web, everything needs to be gray and plain.
echelon 7 hours ago [-]
It'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 5 hours ago [-]
Lack 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.
codewiththiha 6 hours ago [-]
So this is basically the Thanos of web devs
nalekberov 2 hours ago [-]
People will do any useless thing to self-promote.
pmdr 1 hours ago [-]
Well, it is somewhat entertaining.
DonHopkins 3 hours ago [-]
He'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:
Can 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.
0x1ceb00da 5 hours ago [-]
Yoink
firasd 6 hours ago [-]
This 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...
modzu 5 hours ago [-]
none of them work
ninjahawk1 5 hours ago [-]
Very nice.
Now let’s see Paul Allen’s buttons
pmdr 1 hours ago [-]
Haha, there was a post about 98.css the other day, I'm pretty sure it's one of those.
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.
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.)
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.
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!)
I'm old-school. :)
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.
No wonder OSX felt like the future.
I miss the future.
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.
https://getbootstrap.com/1.0.0/
They may have peaked with 2.0:
https://getbootstrap.com/2.0.2/
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.
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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface)
there are others i think
https://component.gallery/components/button/
Just putting this out there for those who are not in the know. This type of crisis is easily avoidable.
https://uiverse.io/buttons
wow
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Buttons_(1962_film)
The buttons (at 2:25) : https://youtu.be/O5StEEzpT04?t=145
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
just like the site's author :DMaybe something like tvtropes.com, but for web application design, and of course with visual examples.
I reported it to the FBI but still no response from them. This shit is serious guys and when will it end?
It would be cool if you could steal them but that would probably be bad.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-QgWOSVKm4&t=724s
Now let’s see Paul Allen’s buttons