Web designs are getting too complicated • Hacker News Board

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#81

Post by potato-peeler » Tue, Jun 10, 2025, 12:39 PM UTC

chrismorgan wrote: post #11

Starting with Awwwards is a mistake. Awwwards is not representative of the web at large—it is an art gallery of interesting, atypical and normally impractical and/or bad designs. Boringly good sites will never appear on there, they’re not interesting . Awwwards is not at all representative of the web at large. The set of problems of most websites are almost entirely disjoint from the set of problems on Awwwards sites…

It is representative of the web at large. This flashiness promoted by award design sites are taken as inspiration to develop your average corporate site.

Look at any corporate site, all of them have the same structure - big text and images, animations as you scroll and unsuitable for viewing on slightly older devices.

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#82

Post by chrismorgan » Tue, Jun 10, 2025, 12:57 PM UTC

potato-peeler wrote: post #81

chrismorgan wrote: post #11

Starting with Awwwards is a mistake. Awwwards is not representative of the web at large—it is an art gallery of interesting, atypical and normally impractical and/or bad designs. Boringly good sites will never appear on there, they’re not interesting . Awwwards is not at all representative of the web at large. The set of problems of most websites are almost entirely disjoint from the set of problems on Awwwards sites…

It is representative of the web at large. This flashiness promoted by award design sites are taken as inspiration to develop your average corporate site. Look at any corporate site, all of them have the same structure - big text and images, animations as you scroll and unsuitable for viewing on slightly older devices.

Look at each site of the day from the last week, and compare them to your average corporate site.

10th: no resemblance whatsoever, enormous unforced usability problems (e.g. scrolljacking).

9th: grossly unusable, no resemblance whatsoever. Exemplar of the worst excesses of a highly-ranked Awwwards site.

8th: a lot of resemblance, but the “interesting” parts are the bad parts.

7th: see 8th.

6th: superficial resemblance, but with far more problems due to being “interesting”.

5th: no real resemblance, bad scrolljacking problems.

4th: see 5th.

Long-known-to-be-harmful trends like scrolljacking and replacing the cursor (probably with a `backdrop-filter: invert(1)` circle, these days) seem to appear on well more than half of the Awwwards site; but they are fortunately rare on the web at large.

I’m not saying corporate sites are without problems—“yes, things are stupidly bad”—but the persistent stupidity that is scroll-linked entrance animations are a very different kettle of fish from the problems of a typical Awwwards site.

Re: Web designs are getting too complicated

#83

Post by potato-peeler » Tue, Jun 10, 2025, 8:07 PM UTC

chrismorgan wrote: post #82

potato-peeler wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is representative of the web at large. This flashiness promoted by award design sites are taken as inspiration to develop your average corporate site. Look at any corporate site, all of them have the same structure - big text and images, animations as you scroll and unsuitable for viewing on slightly older devices.

Look at each site of the day from the last week, and compare them to your average corporate site. 10th: no resemblance whatsoever, enormous unforced usability problems (e.g. scrolljacking). 9th: grossly unusable, no resemblance whatsoever. Exemplar of the worst excesses of a highly-ranked Awwwards site. 8th: a lot of resemblance, but the “interesting” parts are the bad parts. 7th: see 8th. 6th: superficial resemblanc…

From the blog -

> Instead we get auto-playing videos, excessive animations, aggressive pop-ups, and disappearing text. It's frustrating

I randomly pulled up stripe.com alternatives [0] [1] [2] [3] [4] - literally all of them have the same style of global menu, unwanted animations as you scroll, big text, big images, and I guarantee you none of them will work properly in an older browser, (try a 2 yr old mobile os).

[0] - https://tipalti.com/resources/learn/stripe-competitors-and-a... [1] - https://tipalti.com/en-eu/ [2] - https://trolley.com/pay/ [3] - https://www.paypal.com/nz/home [4] - https://www.payoneer.com/

Here are first 3 sites I pulled from producthunt - [5] [6] [7] - again literally the same structure and problems.

[5] - https://chroniclehq.com/ [6] - https://bubble.io [7] - https://wegic.ai/

The author clearly mentions this as a problem, just too many animations, for no reason at all. Are you telling me these weren't inspired from awwwards?

Design has gone to the gutters - material design/windows 11 design/liquid glass design. All of them are sacrificing usability over unwanted animations.

I seriously miss the days of blackberry and nokia. Usability was paramount those days.

> Long-known-to-be-harmful trends like scrolljacking and replacing the cursor ... seem to appear on well more than half of the Awwwards site; but they are fortunately rare on the web at large

Give it some time my friend, it wont take long [https://design.google/]