Awesome Web Pages

The web is wonderful.

Inspired by a combination of obsessing over the design of a few sites I’ve discovered recently(ish) and having way too many open tabs, I’ve started collecting some sites which are either particularly inspiring or have design elements I find notable.

Personal Homepages

Katherine Yang’s Home Page (archive)

I keep coming back to this just to look at it. I love both the current layout and how it grows over time. Every time I spend some time here I catch something new.

The section “i carry your website with me( i carry it in my website )” directly inspired me to start collecting these somewhere (that, and the overwhelming number of open tabs I’ve got collecting such things). She’s got great taste, both in what she’s doing on her own site and what she collects and references (which is part of what also makes her a great follow on the Fediverse: @kayserifserif@sunny.garden (and with a very clever username). Over there, she also was my introduction to CSS Naked Day and JS Naked Day, both of which are neat design projects I’d love to see more participation in.

Her /work page also links to some of her really interesting work elsewhere. I first discovered her when someone referenced Coem (archive), which I think is simply beautiful. I’m also very fond of the closely related Prose Play (archive) and the ode to smallness bot.

Anh’s Homepage (archive)

The other home page I keep coming back to just to poke around and marvel. The current “Version Noir” is just amazing, but also notable is that she keeps a great changelog-style page (archive) tracking significant changes, with notes on fonts, process write-ups, and so on. I particularly appreciate the Weeknotes in her blog (archive) and would love to develop the habit of doing something similar (I think that’s what I’m fumbling towards with my technical reports, but I had the scope way off). I also really appreciate the way her about page breaks out different views for different aspects of her.

Scott Vandehey’s Home Page (archive)

I love how well this does at looking like an honest-to-goodness paper character sheet. From a CSS perspective, the trick of attaching one border to an element and a different border to the ::after is very clever. The choice of font, making it look like pen writing within a pre-printed sheet, works really well, too, and isn’t distracting the way I find a lot of “handwriting” fonts to be.

Stefan Bohacek’s Projects Page (archive)

The home page is okay, but I really like this projects page. The “cards” model works really well here; it scales down nicely, but it works even better on larger displays. Similarly for his /blog page. It seems weird and unfortunate that populating the card contents, beyond the main/front content, is so JS dependent.

Corporate Media

Most of the corporate web is, well, kinda trash. But there are some bright spots: organizations which seem to have respect for their readers and an appreciation of the platform that they’re on.

The Verge (archive)

A lot got written about The Verge’s redesign when it happened, and for good reason. The highlight here is their “Storystream”, an obviously timeline-inspired, post-Twitter take on a news service’s home page. The key insight that they need to have a place for their writers to put not-full-story-sized things that’s theirs (as opposed to Twitter, or even some non-Verge Mastodon server) holds up really well. The other… Sections (I’m not sure if they have an official name; the box like “Most Popular” and “Just For You”) work well on a larger display, but I do wish there was a way to remove them when on a thin one. Their responsive design is otherwise a really good example for something with that much going on (even if it could arguably just have less going on).