Stolen Buttons

(anatolyzenkov.com)

384 points | by Gecko4072 5 days ago ago

85 comments

  • donohoe 2 hours ago ago

    I have noticed on occasion websites with a missing button. Now I know what happened. Finally, closure.

    • leoc 14 minutes ago ago

      The legend of the Button-Eater who comes out from his lair somewhere deep inside the Web.

    • dmd an hour ago ago

      You wouldn’t download a button

  • gkoberger an hour ago ago

    There's a Chrome Extension he made based on this: 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 35 minutes ago ago

      Why I third party? Aren’t the stolen buttons stored locally?

      • altcognito 33 minutes ago ago

        I think due to the nature of extensions.

  • internet2000 2 minutes ago ago

    10000 buttons and not a single engaging Call To Action

  • karim79 2 minutes ago 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?

  • input_sh 5 hours ago ago

    Too bad they're just static, as the website doesn't copy the hover state or the on-click animations.

    • dorianmariecom 4 hours ago ago

      :hover and :focus

      there are others i think

  • binaryturtle 5 hours ago 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'm old-school. :)

    • nielssp 4 hours ago ago

      You might like this: https://nielssp.dk/guis/buttons

      • phatskat 32 minutes ago 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

      • jsrcout an hour ago 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.

      • jprd an hour ago ago

        Oh wow, that was so cathartic. Thank you for sharing.

      • binaryturtle 3 hours ago ago

        A few really nice buttons there, indeed. :)

      • Kuyawa 3 hours ago ago

        Ubuntu 2020 wins, only one dark themed

        • inigyou 2 hours ago ago

          Dark themes are for people who can't lower their screen brightness.

      • reaperducer 3 hours ago 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 3 hours ago ago

          For me the 2001 OSX looks wishy washy and does not have a professional look.

          • RattlesnakeJake 2 hours ago 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 2 hours ago 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.

      • pimlottc 2 hours ago ago

        What, no BeOS?! :)

    • duxup 22 minutes ago ago

      I unironically prefer the UI of old Bootstrap:

      https://getbootstrap.com/1.0.0/

      They may have peaked with 2.0:

      https://getbootstrap.com/2.0.2/

    • QuantumNomad_ 4 hours ago 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 4 hours ago ago

        They didn't copy any hold/hover states which is too bad, those are an integral part of a button IMO

    • madibo3156 4 hours ago ago

      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?

    • waynecochran an hour ago ago

      Apple and Jony Ive killed skeuomorph design a long time ago.

    • jonwinstanley 3 hours ago ago

      Web 2.0 was fun :-)

  • culi 2 hours ago ago

    Button components across major component galleries:

    https://component.gallery/components/button/

    • jsrcout an hour ago ago

      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.

  • amelius 4 hours ago ago

    For inspiration, I prefer this one:

    https://uiverse.io/buttons

    • Gualdrapo 4 hours ago ago
      • busymom0 2 hours ago ago

        Doesn't work for me at all on iOS Safari?

      • reaperducer 3 hours ago ago

        That's the only interesting one. The rest are a snoozefest of corporate mediocrity.

    • anon7000 4 hours ago ago

      I don’t think it’s for animation, it’s to collect all the different buttons seen in the wild

    • Jaxan 2 hours ago ago

      Oh this reminds me that we used to create buttons for navigation in flash!

    • jstanley 4 hours ago 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.

  • JSR_FDED 3 hours ago ago

    Surprising how not one of these made my heart beat faster.

    • michaelt 3 hours ago ago

      None of them push your buttons, huh?

  • jonathrg 3 hours ago ago

    That's rude. Give them back

  • moritzwarhier an hour ago 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.

  • thih9 4 hours ago ago

    I wish there was a way to exclude the plain ones (single color rectangle with rounded corners and text).

    • dozerly 2 hours ago ago

      It would be cool to classify and categorize them so you could filter by attributes

  • leoc an hour ago ago

    It would be lovely to see some of those converted into enamelled metal badges.

  • a1o 2 hours ago ago

    Are we in flat design for way too long or is this a recent idea and the collection is also very recent?

  • wuhhh 5 hours ago ago

    I can’t look, so many arrows poorly aligned with text - how can these developers live with themselves!

    • Aardwolf 5 hours ago 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 5 hours ago ago

        They're usually done with SVGs or CSS pseudoelements (a clip-path polygon or borders and rotation) rather than Unicode arrows

        • wuhhh 4 hours ago 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 3 hours ago ago

            And then the line wraps.

            • wuhhh 3 hours ago ago

              Alright I’ll take the bait, flex shrink none on the svg, white space no wrap on the text

  • Waterluvian 5 hours ago 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.

  • sshasan 3 hours ago 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.

  • finger 4 hours ago ago

    It would be interesting if it was possible to sort them by similarity, width, height, shape, color, etc.

  • armchairhacker 2 hours ago ago

    You're visiting boring websites. I only saw one barely skeuomorphic button

  • Retr0id 5 hours ago ago

    Interesting choice to hotlink all the images! The side-effect is that some are dead now.

  • khazhoux 2 hours ago ago

    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.

  • bnj 3 hours ago ago

    Great, how are we supposed to use those websites now? No wonder web is breaking down

  • nalekberov 36 minutes ago ago

    People will do any useless thing to self-promote.

  • hmokiguess 5 hours ago ago

    You should deduplicate and offer a cluster view with similarity distance

  • t-sauer 3 hours ago ago

    610 buttons are anchor elements, and only 285 are actually real buttons.

  • joncooper 2 hours ago ago

    You made my day. What a joyful, weird, fun projec!

    • nate 2 hours ago 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 :)

  • DonHopkins an hour ago 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:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-QgWOSVKm4&t=724s

  • nine_k 2 hours ago ago

    So few of them look clickable.

  • iefbr14 4 hours ago ago

    It reminds me a bit of the toolbar mania in the nineties :)

  • aghilmort 5 hours ago ago

    this is really great like collecting bottle caps except is buttons

  • thomasfl 5 hours ago ago

    So many different looking buttons. Wish there were more standards.

    • dandellion 5 hours ago 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 5 hours ago ago

        A better time. Before flat material lameness and Corporate Memphis.

    • dev1ycan 3 hours ago ago

      Yeah, let's take the remaining fun out of the web, everything needs to be gray and plain.

    • echelon 5 hours ago 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 4 hours ago 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 4 hours ago ago

    So this is basically the Thanos of web devs

  • 0x1ceb00da 3 hours ago ago

    Yoink

  • firasd 4 hours ago 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 3 hours ago ago

    none of them work

  • ninjahawk1 3 hours ago ago

    Very nice.

    Now let’s see Paul Allen’s buttons