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Design & UX

The most popular blog posts about design & ux on Hacker News. 153 posts.

2025
123

Anno 1800: Shadows of Beauty

While playing Anno 1800 , I noticed something which I’ve never noticed before in any other game (but to be fair, I don’t play too many city builders): The sun keeps a position relative to the camera and thus the shadows alway s fall from left to right:

127

Deconstructing the "Whimsical Animations" landing page

I spent the past few weeks packing as many easter eggs as I could into my latest project, and in this blog post, I want to dig into some of the more interesting details! If you’re interested in animations/interactions, you’ll want to check this one out; I share a bunch of my favourite secrets and tricks. 😄

129

Issues with color spaces and perceptual brightness

Unlike RGB, the CIELab color space And the more modern variants like CIECAM02 and Oklab. is designed to be perceptually uniform. This is a broad goal, which roughly means that we would like changes in the numbers to match same changes that we observe when performing various studies of human perce

130

Airbrush art of the 80s (2015)

The 80’s was a decade of many things — excess, greed, and big hair, to name a few — but it was also the heyday for airbrush art. As a teenager in the late 80’s, I desperately wanted an airbrush so I could paint my favorite band logos on the back of my jean jacket, and maybe make some money on the side painting…

131

Just Use HTML

I’ve worked on so many projects recently that were more complicated than they needed to be because they used JavaScript to generate HTML. JavaScript is… Slower to load Slower to run More prone to breaking Harder to read and reason about Doesn’t actually look like the final output It’s inferior to just using HTML in…

132

Why Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes

Everything put into the building that is unnecessary, every cubic foot that is used for purely ornamental purposes beyond that needed to express its use and to make it harmonize with others of its class, is a waste — is, to put it in plain English, perverting someone’s money — George Hill, commercial real estate…

139

Towards the Cutest Neural Network

I recently needed to use a microcontroller to estimate the pose (translation and orientation) of an object using readings from six different sensors. Since the readings were non-linear and coupled with each other, an explicit analytical solution was out of the question.

144

Grass Rendering Series

This is part 1 of a multi-part series on grass rendering. We’ll start by figuring out how realistic grass should look like, and how herbage can be modeled with the tools we have at our disposal in real-time 3D graphics. Then, we’ll look at how to implement different methods of grass rendering in Godot. However, most…