st_phan (u/st_phan) - Readit News

st_phan commented on MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today blog.decryption.net.au/po... · Posted by u/decryption

seabombs · 2 months ago

There's a term I read about a long time ago, I think it was "aesthetic completeness" or something like that. It was used in the context of video games whose art direction was fully realized in the game, i.e. increases in graphics hardware or capabilities wouldn't add anything to the game in an artistic sense. The original Homeworld games were held up as examples.

Anyway, this reminded me of that. Making these pictures in anything but the tools of the time wouldn't just change them, they'd be totally different artworks. The medium is part of the artwork itself.

st_phan · 2 months ago

Do you think you could find the article? It sounds super interesting.

I tried Claude and it mentioned the term might actually be „Aesthetic sufficiency“, but I couldn‘t find an essay with Homeworld on it.

st_phan commented on Show HN: A collection of interface elements (inspiration for designers and devs) interface-index.com/... · Posted by u/st_phan

st_phan · 4 years ago

‣ In a nutshell

Hi, I am Stephan and I created this website collecting interface elements across various products (with a focus on B2B and SaaS, especially on desktop).

‣ Why?

For me it was time-consuming researching how other designers solved certain UI problems. Especially when the problems are niche or tricky – like "3D part viewers", "roles and permissions" or complicated filtering. I wanted a quicker way! I now compiled 300+ examples based on 150+ screenshots from 17 products so others don't have to do the same research as I did.

‣ Why (I think) it's cool

- Inspiration within a few clicks across various product types

- The interface elements are shown in isolation → clicking on them reveals the full interface for better context

- Open for contributions so it can grow quickly in content and thus usefulness – I want it to be the "Wikipedia of interface elements"

- Teaser: Once the UI element collection is big, I am planning to launch user flows (onboarding, sign up, 2FA, etc.)

‣ Technology

I am pretty proud of the tech too:

(1) It's built using Astro (https://astro.build/) and TailwindCSS (https://tailwindcss.com/) which I discovered both via HN → It's a static site with almost 0 JS, so loading times and footprint should be pretty good.

(2) I use the design tool Figma as a data editor and database. I explain this here https://twitter.com/st_phan/status/1425138470486519808

(3) I wrote a custom grid algorithm to layout the screenshots so the client doesn't have to compute the layout (I am planning on writing a "making of"-blogpost to explain the details)

(4) I use ethical analytics using Plausible (https://plausible.io/) because nobody wants cookie banners or creepy tracking ...

‣ Thanks for reading, any feedback is welcome.

st_phan commented on Show HN: A link preview generator for your notes app link-previews.stephanbogn... · Posted by u/st_phan

st_phan · 4 years ago

I created this small tool that I wanted to share with you

What's its purpose? I take all my notes with good ol' plain text markdown files so I can store them locally and not be reliant on some service. (The "zettelkasten" note taking approach in combination with "The Archive" is really great!)

Plain text is great, but especially for things to watch/play/read those website previews that you get in Telegram/Slack/Notion are really good to remember what the link was about.

So what the "Link Preview Generator" does, is it generates such previews but as downloadable PNGs so you can do whatever you want with them – in my case put them in my notes app.

It's probably a pretty niche/obscure problem that I faced but I guess if I have the problem, somebody else might too!

Anyway thanks for reading. Feedback is welcome!