Stolen Buttons (anatolyzenkov.com)

410 points by Gecko4072 5 days ago

donohoe 3 hours ago

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

dmd an hour ago

You wouldn’t download a button

leoc 39 minutes ago

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

mlok 8 minutes 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Buttons_(1962_film)

The buttons (at 2:25) : https://youtu.be/O5StEEzpT04?t=145

gkoberger an hour 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 an hour ago

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

altcognito an hour ago

I think due to the nature of extensions.

input_sh 5 hours 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

:hover and :focus

there are others i think

karim79 16 minutes 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.

binaryturtle 5 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'm old-school. :)

nielssp 4 hours ago

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

phatskat an hour 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 2 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.

jprd 2 hours ago

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

binaryturtle 4 hours ago

A few really nice buttons there, indeed. :)

Kuyawa 3 hours ago

Ubuntu 2020 wins, only one dark themed

inigyou 2 hours ago

reaperducer 4 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 3 hours ago

pimlottc 2 hours ago

What, no BeOS?! :)

duxup an hour 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_ 5 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 4 hours 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

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?

RobotToaster 2 hours ago

Also more generally called skeuomorphism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph

binaryturtle 4 hours ago

Earlier era for me actually. I'm a 90s person. :)

DonHopkins an hour ago

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."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface)

waynecochran 2 hours ago

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

jonwinstanley 3 hours ago

Web 2.0 was fun :-)

culi 2 hours ago

Button components across major component galleries:

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

jsrcout 2 hours 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 5 hours ago

For inspiration, I prefer this one:

https://uiverse.io/buttons

pmdr 5 minutes ago

Is there something similar, but for menus?

Gualdrapo 4 hours ago

busymom0 2 hours ago

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

reaperducer 3 hours ago

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

Jaxan 3 hours ago

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

anon7000 5 hours ago

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

jstanley 4 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.

JSR_FDED 3 hours ago

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

michaelt 3 hours ago

None of them push your buttons, huh?

jonathrg 3 hours ago

That's rude. Give them back

karim79 27 minutes 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 27 minutes ago

10000 buttons and not a single engaging Call To Action

moritzwarhier 2 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.

thih9 4 hours ago

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

dozerly 2 hours ago

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

wuhhh 6 hours ago

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

Aardwolf 5 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 5 hours ago

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

wuhhh 5 hours ago

a1o 3 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 16 minutes ago

It’s definitely been too long, since around 15 years ago.

leoc an hour ago

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

Waterluvian 5 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.

Gecko4072 5 hours ago

Waterluvian 5 hours ago

Thanks. Gah I feel blind. I went back and it’s right there at the top

Gecko4072 5 hours ago

sshasan 3 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.

finger 5 hours ago

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

Retr0id 5 hours ago

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

armchairhacker 3 hours ago

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

khazhoux 3 hours 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.

hmokiguess 5 hours ago

You should deduplicate and offer a cluster view with similarity distance

bnj 3 hours ago

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

t-sauer 3 hours ago

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

joncooper 3 hours ago

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

nate 3 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 :)

nalekberov an hour ago

People will do any useless thing to self-promote.

pmdr 3 minutes ago

Well, it is somewhat entertaining.

nine_k 2 hours ago

So few of them look clickable.

iefbr14 4 hours ago

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

DonHopkins an hour 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

aghilmort 5 hours ago

this is really great like collecting bottle caps except is buttons

thomasfl 5 hours ago

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

dandellion 5 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 5 hours ago

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

dev1ycan 3 hours ago

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

echelon 5 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 4 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 5 hours ago

So this is basically the Thanos of web devs

0x1ceb00da 4 hours ago

Yoink

firasd 5 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 3 hours ago

none of them work

ninjahawk1 3 hours ago

Very nice.

Now let’s see Paul Allen’s buttons

pmdr 2 minutes ago

Haha, there was a post about 98.css the other day, I'm pretty sure it's one of those.