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

• leoc

  today at 8:01 PM

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

• dmd

  today at 7:16 PM

  You wouldn’t download a button

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

  today at 7:40 PM

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

  • altcognito

    today at 7:42 PM

    I think due to the nature of extensions.

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

• dorianmariecom

  today at 4:15 PM

  :hover and :focus

  there are others i think

• today at 5:46 PM

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

  today at 4:24 PM

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

  • phatskat

    today at 7:43 PM

    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

    today at 7:02 PM

    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

    today at 7:08 PM

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

  • binaryturtle

    today at 5:00 PM

    A few really nice buttons there, indeed. :)

  • Kuyawa

    today at 5:21 PM

    Ubuntu 2020 wins, only one dark themed

    • inigyou

      today at 6:16 PM

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

  • reaperducer

    today at 5:06 PM

    So interesting to see the contrast between OSX and Windows in 2001.

    No wonder OSX felt like the future.

    I miss the future.

    • bhaak

      today at 5:41 PM

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

      • RattlesnakeJake

        today at 6:04 PM

        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

          today at 6:19 PM

          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

    today at 6:18 PM

    What, no BeOS?! :)

• duxup

  today at 7:54 PM

  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_

  today at 4:02 PM

  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

    today at 4:16 PM

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

• madibo3156

  today at 4:25 PM

  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

    today at 6:30 PM

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

  • binaryturtle

    today at 5:03 PM

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

  • DonHopkins

    today at 7:32 PM

    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

  today at 6:59 PM

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

• jonwinstanley

  today at 5:43 PM

  Web 2.0 was fun :-)

Button components across major component galleries:

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

• jsrcout

  today at 7:01 PM

  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.

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?

10000 buttons and not a single engaging Call To Action

For inspiration, I prefer this one:

https://uiverse.io/buttons

• Gualdrapo

  today at 4:12 PM

  https://uiverse.io/GreyD097/great-rat-93

  wow

  • busymom0

    today at 6:21 PM

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

  • reaperducer

    today at 5:16 PM

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

• anon7000

  today at 4:07 PM

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

• Jaxan

  today at 5:59 PM

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

• jstanley

  today at 4:13 PM

  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.

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

• michaelt

  today at 5:28 PM

  None of them push your buttons, huh?

That's rude. Give them back

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

Maybe something like tvtropes.com, but for web application design, and of course with visual examples.

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

• dozerly

  today at 6:43 PM

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

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

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

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

• Aardwolf

  today at 3:12 PM

  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

    today at 3:21 PM

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

    • wuhhh

      today at 4:06 PM

      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

        today at 5:18 PM

        And then the line wraps.

        • wuhhh

          today at 5:24 PM

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

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

  today at 3:41 PM

  https://anatolyzenkov.com/stolen-buttons/button-stealer

  • Waterluvian

    today at 3:52 PM

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

    • Gecko4072

      today at 3:58 PM

      Ha there were a few buttons on the page that might’ve been distracting lol

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

You should deduplicate and offer a cluster view with similarity distance

People will do any useless thing to self-promote.

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

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

• nate

  today at 6:04 PM

  for sure. every day i come here hoping for something like this. something like the old milliondollarhomepage kind of things. i miss that stuff :)

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

So few of them look clickable.

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

this is really great like collecting bottle caps except is buttons

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

• dandellion

  today at 3:24 PM

  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

    today at 3:33 PM

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

• dev1ycan

  today at 5:28 PM

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

• echelon

  today at 3:23 PM

  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

    today at 4:43 PM

    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.

So this is basically the Thanos of web devs

Yoink

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...

none of them work

Very nice.

Now let’s see Paul Allen’s buttons