Loadmo.re: design inspiration for unconventional web
loadmo.re385 points by surprisetalk 3 days ago
385 points by surprisetalk 3 days ago
This is not unconventional-- this is the conventional web I want. I want the internet to be a groovy place again.
Rave on ravers.
Not sure if I'm with you on this one. I see what you mean but I also have a hard time to understand what's going on on these sites. So in my eyes these are quite exactly what the author called it. Unconventional. However I like the idea of getting these concepts shown and shared just to see what could might work or what causes a lot of attention.
reminds me of early Flash days where everyone was so excited about not having to use tables/frames/etc and started making "organic" sites instead of structured sites. so usability was neat and interesting, others were outright confusing. weird styles have their place, but people like to follow trends and use weird styles when it is not appropriate. these tend to feel like square pegs in a round hole.
It does feel a lot like the Flash era.
Girbaud, which was once a cool clothing brand, had an all-Flash site for years. It looked like a 3D stack of cubes, and if you clicked on the cubes, interesting things happened. Short videos and pictures would pop up, audio clips would play, and then they'd fold back into their cubes. Very cute.
But it was really hard to order stuff. Just finding out where the items for sale were was tough.
Their site today is totally vanilla. They have product pages and "Add to Cart" buttons, like everybody else.[1]
It is neat, but personally I'm not wild about it. Most of these examples are terrible for accessibility needs, and otherwise a frustration if you visited to find specific information. I do appreciate the novelty though.
I think that it might be good-- taking a queue from the legacy of, "markup is separated from presentation" that sites that display information in a straightforward way should be, "boring and accessible as fuck" where, "conveying abstract information" should be, "inspiring."
I feel like we can have our cake and eat it too.
I get the idea but these feel like those demoscene things people make for really old 8-bit computers.
What I am looking for is inspiration for presenting some actual content, for example, stories with a beginning, middle and end, with meaningful call to action forms and text that is designed to be read rather than 'shapes on a page'.
I am not dismissing what goes on here, or even the demoscene, it is great to see. However, I think that people are struggling to read these days, so lots of text, no matter how well presented, is just not what people read. How do you get people totally absorbed without it being video or a game?
I understand the UX of the UK government websites where information is presented very clearly and is engaging (if you need to do something to do with health, taxes and whatnot). But this super-clear approach doesn't convey that an immense amount of effort has been spent on presentation.
I am also bored of normal Wordpress style websites with the tedious carousels and whatnot, Squarespace fits this 'yawn' style too.
Although I did not find a website to be deeply engaged in with loadmo.re, I am inspired and impressed. There is much to borrow from here and many 'experiments' that are trying to do things new. Props to the site maintainer for doing the research to find these 'diamonds (in the rough)'.
How I miss Kaliber 10000 (aka k10k), Design Is Kinky, Pixel Surgeon etc.
Found this on there, which is really neat: https://slingshot.trudy.computer/
It took me a while to figure out what this is even supposed to be. Visiting from a computer with no webcam displays a confusing site.
thank u for playing!
I found https://gizmo.party/ via your site, which I am also very much enjoying! Very fun use of vibe-coding, which I’ve been overall pretty resistant to.
Although I do wish it wasn’t such a black box — I wish the code for the gizmos could be examined, exported, or embedded elsewhere.
Respect to the people making these and some are really cool but damn these sites make me appreciate conventional web design.
ironic that I can't get to the bottom of the home page to read the about/subscribe/submit, because it keeps loading more sites in
especially considering they actually have inputs for suggesting a website and signing up for their newsletter (that can't be filled out)
Good for the site engagement metrics
Is that a known intentional dark-pattern to drive engagement?
In this case, Hanlon's razor almost certainly applies. In terms of engagement, if someone wants to subscribe, that's better for engagement than infinite scroll.
A pretty unconventional way to prevent more than 1000 submissions, I guess.
Does anyone have an aggregate of websites like these? I love this type of content (I am a shit designer and want to get better).
Try this https://www.are.na/trudy-painter/cool-websites-yj6tfjbuhp8 From there, you either find single websites, or other people's lists of websites they like.
It is random walk down a rabbit hole, but quite entertaining (and inspiring).
a few more sites (rather than aggregators):
- https://cargo.site/templates/samples-specimens and https://cargo.site/templates in general (scroll down and then scroll horizontally to see a lot more)
- https://html.energy/html-day/2025/index.html
- a few inspiring friends and friends of friends: https://julipode.net/ , https://katarinamazur.com/ , https://kotc.life/ , https://suneinyneeenan.github.io/Enhydrax/
You mean an aggregate of aggregation websites?
Yes. :)
Makes me think of all the higher-order awesome lists on GitHub
Unconventional as in "you can't disable Google Analytics cookies from the cookie banner"?
[flagged]
All this amazing art and stuff on this site and all you could do was find something nitpicky to complain about? Sure says a lot…
The website's raison d'être is linking to other websites, and that part doesn't work well. It's not a nitpick if the main thing is broken.
It’s not broken, just not to your liking. It’s one extra click. Also way to miss my point.
For something to be unconventional, there needs to be the understanding of conventionality. The web is built on Hyperlinks and UI/UX are its languages of interaction, whose patterns have been learned throughout years. The big challenge in advancing that language is to not interrupt established patterns, so the interaction won't be perceived as broken. Turning a Hyperlink into a two-click experience is quite a statement, so people respond.
Besides, "amazing art stuff"? Please, it's an aggregator that links to experiments in interaction design.
It says that UX matters even when doing art.
UX matters when doing art = pen, paper, paint.
But UX does not matter when experiencing art. OP is entitled to feel nit picky and pissy and a critic because of the normal way they experience the web. It does not mean his critique matters.
UX may not matter to you when experiencing art, but it certainly matters to me when experiencing art. A lack of care for whether or not the art is actually accessible to its audience makes it indistinguishable from the pretentious “avant garde” slop that exists primarily to allow “art dealers” to launder money.
Even worse, this website is less analogous to the art itself and more analogous to an art gallery, which means that now my perception of the art being showcased is now unfairly negative through no fault of the actual art on display. If I'm trying to view some painting at the Louvre only for the curator to jump in front of me and say “Wait! Do you really want to view that painting or do you want a notecard saying where it is?”, damn straight am I going to be annoyed as all hell at such antics, and it's going to ruin my experience through no fault of the actual artist.
> But UX does not matter when experiencing art.
... UX is the only thing that matters when experiencing art.
More to the point, though, in this case the art is purporting to be a functional website, so we're absolutely allowed to critique it on the grounds of being bad at that.
Exactly this. I hate to say it but this is the main reason I stopped coming to HN. I need some kind of, like, Marvin the Robot filter to make it so I can more easily avoid the tiny thoughts.
Marvin the robot filter! What a great way to put it. There’s so many sour old men on this site haha
> but this is the main reason I stopped coming to HN
Yet you're here, commenting.
They probably meant coming here directly or often, not that hard to work that out.
Yours is a very obnoxious comment; one that I agree with entirely. I'm happy for finding the website and like its content, but I do dislike that little feature. Leave links alone!
Wow every preview is screen recored on iPhone
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If only there was a protocol that would allow me to subscribe to new entries published on a website …
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