I’ve always been a critic of Stripe design - although it’s silky smooth and nice, those animations and what not are not as important as densely packed, well organized and information rich UI. People rave about Stripe’s design as if it’s something everyone needs to follow - I couldn’t disagree more. Stripe’s design is overrated and overblown on HN.
Drew has nailed this aspect and I think he wrote about it in his blog.
Today’s design fads are: Gradients (Apple), Magenta colors (Firefox, basically any SaaS) and Brutalist design (Dropbox rebrand), probably a few more that I can’t think of right now.
This shit needs to stop guys. I don’t have anything against a designers but when a designer is designing for the sake of making something without drilling down why it needs to be that way - stop right there and reevaluate. This also applies to non-designers that design things as well. Design is about how things work, not animations and slick effects that wow the users.
e.g., if I'm looking at the Sourcehut source code here: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/
I would expect to be "in" the Sourcehut project, and clicking any of the links at the top would take me to builds, todo, lists, etc. related to that project...but it doesn't, and I don't see any way to go to those things related to the project.
And, to add further confusion, even though I'm logged in, clicking any of those links invites me to login/register again. Frankly, I have no idea WTF is going on in this UI. It looks fine, but it's not at all easy to use for me.