Show HN: A Handcrafted Web

http://www.scrollkit.com/s/O7MsYbD

by kateray • 14 years ago

131 81 14 years ago

scrollkit.com

ktsmith3• 14 years ago

This team page reminds me of geocities from the late 90s. https://www.scrollkit.com/s/iaJos01

sprobertson• 14 years ago

Geocities in HD, at least

jastanton• 14 years ago

Im not sure if high def is the right adjective: https://www.scrollkit.com/s/plIhCWv

pawelwentpawel• 14 years ago

This psychodelic background "rainbow" + music from the video gives me a trip.

Yet still, might be quite attractive for hipster sapiens.

sharkweek• 14 years ago

one of those full circle type things -- it's far enough behind us that it's now funny and hip

creamyhorror2• 14 years ago

I like it. Lots of personality, you know they're there to make it fun.

We could do with a return of the GeoCities self-made-page aesthetic (with improved aesthetic sense, of course) on a web where everything on the big sites is neatly templated and identical in layout. Amidst all the consistency, I've been missing the touches that used to make personal sites unique. All people do on their blogs now is throw on funny pictures; the format/layout is never broken, or it simply can't be.

This is a good reminder to us to break the mould whenever we feel it's appropriate (or whenever we feel like it).

ktsmith3• 14 years ago

I feel the opposite and don't particularly care for it. The page is basically content free has some content that is difficult to read and contains seizure inducing animation.

wpietri• 14 years ago

That's an excellent point. But I hope people who build mold-breaking tools realize that most people don't have sufficiently strong aesthetic sense to create beautiful things out of the gate.

For whatever reason, we keep having to relearn the "angry fruit salad" lesson over and over: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/A/angry-fruit-salad.html

Homunculiheaded• 14 years ago

I think in 5 years we'll look back and see this as web design's "VonDutch hat" moment.

seangransee• 14 years ago

the page itself makes this look like a step forward for the web, but the video at the bottom makes it look like a step backward.

druidsbane• 14 years ago

The heart wants what it wants. You can't run from that!

reaktivo• 14 years ago

I really like what ReadyMag http://readymag.com is proposing in this area.

creamyhorror2• 14 years ago

Wow, this is kind of wonderful. It somehow does "vibrant yet professional" really well, in contrast with the "genuine amateur" feel of scrollkit. They have one hell of a designer, that's for sure. Seems like they're proposing a Photoshop/Flash-like rich-app design interface for webpages?

I'd like to play around with the app but the Team slide is causing my browser to hang.

irollboozers• 14 years ago

Shame, their team page is brilliant. You can so clearly tell who the designers vs. coders are by their shoes.

Definitely hipster enough, but with a more professional European style than the NYU-Hipster Runoff style of ScrollKit. I personally prefer Readymag actually.

webdevme• 14 years ago

That looks great! Does anyone know how they achieved that accordion slider for the front page?

ShawnBird2• 14 years ago

Looks like it comes from here: http://readymag.com/js/homepage/homepage.js

Swizec• 14 years ago

Love the "Go slower" idea. Would be very refreshing, if more people started doing this.

Then again, I am very much at fault for talking too much and too quickly on twitter.

However, I'm not actually certain what your product does.

kateray4• 14 years ago

We're a tool for people to make webpages without using a template, so they can start from scratch with a totally blank canvas. You can see the sort of things people are making here: http://www.scrollkit.com/s/I6QWRuK/

chalst• 14 years ago

Scrolling through those -- I don't know if I should be impressed or not: how much effort are these to make? -- I saw one that doesn't render well for me:

https://www.scrollkit.com/s/gBbcZ8v

(on an old version of Chromium, 6.0.472.63 - for some reason I am browsing on a stable Debian, but the rendering of css/tables on that version of Chromium seems pretty solid).

Aside from uncertainty, I did have a positive impression: these are pages that aren't instrumented with cruft around the edges, and that makes a huge difference.

markshead• 14 years ago

"The web is the most advanced publishing system we've ever had but the process in which most people publish is backwards next to print."

There were probably similar things said about the shift from hand copied books to using printing presses.

icebraining• 14 years ago

Yes, so? Early printing press probably was less developed than hand copied books in terms of design, but it evolved, which is what they're proposing we do on the web. I don't get your point.

ggreiner• 14 years ago

People hate scrolling or parallax scrolling pages would be much more wide spread, they're easy to make and awesome looking.

Relying on the user scrolling I don't believe is a good idea, but the rest of it I definitely agree with.

splatcollision3• 14 years ago

Edit Room inspired? Be honest... http://www.edit-room.com Also template-free blank canvas web design, a little more professional maybe?

tylerlh• 14 years ago

This sounds pretty biased and accusatory coming from the entity who created said product.

Originality is a rare occurrence these days. Why are you so surprised to find something similar to what you've built?

splatcollision3• 14 years ago

You're right, and my apologies for the snark.

It does seem like many more people are building web design apps, that's all. I like it. This one seems like a decent start, i'll be keeping an eye on it.

mnicole2• 14 years ago

I'd substitute the gradients on your site for solid colors, they're a little too intense. Also the signup password field being in plaintext isn't quite right.

I like what Edit Room tries to do but I think you need to look into finding a UX or UI person that understands web design/development because it is a little too geeky/subtle in implementation for the user that this is targeted for. However, I like how it focuses you in on the content and content-type before you get into designing around it.

splatcollision3• 14 years ago

Thanks very much! I've been working hard on making the UX better, and will have a nice solid update shortly, that should address your concerns. I'll let HN know as soon as the improvements are ready.

One nice thing that's coming is being able to design for different screen widths with a built-in breakpoint tool that creates media queries for you from your design.

MatthewPhillips3• 14 years ago

Blame the move toward blogging systems that separated content from presentation. Blame advertising which has to be front-and-center at all times.

I wonder how advertising would work on the web if you didn't have omni-present ads but instead sometimes the viewport contained no ads, sometimes it contains big huge ads that take up the entire viewport (like a full-page ad in a magazine). Would that make up for them not being visible at all times? Anyone tried this?

ImprovedSilence• 14 years ago

Your idea sounds similar to some websites that show a full page banner with an x in the corner before visiting a certain page.

codegeek• 14 years ago

which i personally absolutely hate.

MatthewPhillips3• 14 years ago

> Your idea sounds similar to some websites that show a full page banner with an x in the corner before visiting a certain page.

Similar, but not the same. That's more like sticking an ad on the cover of a magazine. If you are presented with content, then have to scroll past an ad I think the experience might be better. Currently we live with sidebars that contain omni-present ads.

sdoering2• 14 years ago

Interesting thought. Never thought about it this way (and working in an environment, where it might fit).

Not trying to defend the practice of ads like they are today, but thinking twice brings one thought to my head:

Why recreate the style of an old medium in a new one. When the printing press was developed - for the first decades books just looked like before. looked like they were handwritten by scribes. Gradually books evolved into something more of their own.

So why build digital copies of magazine-layout? I really do not have a better solution - I am merely asking the question, that keeps bugging me all the time, when I think about the evolution of the web.

cws2• 14 years ago

the separation of content and presentation has been important in web design from a code perspective. CSS exists because separating content and presentation was desirable. But most people don't want to deal with all that mess. They want to make a fun web page quickly and easily to serve whatever purpose they have in mind right then.

MatthewPhillips3• 14 years ago

I'm not talking about CSS, I'm talking about removing the content from HTML and sticking it in a database. Thus HTML is merely a template to be reused over and over. Hence boring layouts that work with all content equally well. In some situations this is critical, I'm not arguing against its existence, but we've gone too far in that direction whereas, as this article points out, there's not a lot of tailored web pages on the internet any more. Which is a shame.

d0m• 14 years ago

Please, change the music of the video describing the product.. I had to shut down the volume after 30 seconds of listening to it.

petercooper3• 14 years ago

I didn't have a problem with the music musically but it seems to have a really odd, phased effect which sounds like fake 3D or something..

rbellio• 14 years ago

I like the thought behind this. There is a disparity between the layouts of the print word and the web, though, I think there are a lot of reasons that this is true.

For one, the technology that allows this coupling of design and copy has been slowly maturing and at times has been very cumbersome. In the past, sites that tried to break the tabular, "only text" mold were often slow to load and broke without third party libraries.

As internet speeds improved so did third party support and the design process for this new technical media. The interoperability of the technologies could still lead to a lot of pain when developing for everyone and doing so in a fashionable way.

Now, we're at that fork where everything has matured enough that it's opened up the ability to infuse more character and creativity into our designs and the technology allows the feasibility. However, I think there's still a gap. There's a gap between the idea and the effort required in order to achieve it. There is still transition between the idea, the design and the realization and often we see a loss of inspiration as it comes to that fruition.

I think there is still headway to make on the fluidity and experience of the digital domain. That visceral reaction that many of us enjoy when rifling through the pages of a book or glancing through the glossy pages of a magazine have yet to be duplicated, even if this site makes a great stab at it. To remove the consciousness of the square portal of emitted light is going to be the next frontier though.

mnicole2• 14 years ago

Hi Kate, you guys are probably still tweaking away and have all of this noted, but I'll post some issues I have anyway:

- Thought I was saving the page from the Settings drop-down where it shows me the URL to my site and says "Update", rather than the "Done" button to the top right.

- Expected to be able to drag-and-drop the images to the canvas so I could do it en mass instead of click them, then have the clipart stick to my cursor until I dropped it/resized it before going back into the images panel.

- Not being able to see that the elements have styles attributed to them without clicking into them is kind of rough.

- Outlining an object by a bounding-box instead of the shape of the object can get confusing when you have multiple layers.

- In the layers drop-down, everything is listed as a "Text" element. Some without any description (shape preview would be nice). Should be able to delete the object after selecting it from within this panel too.

- I think the layout would be easier/more familiar for people if the top bar options were vertically-aligned to be a toolbar, and if the user actions bar at the bottom was up at the top right. Have a separate floating box or one that comes in from the right side for when you select an object that has attributes/FX to fiddle with.

- You can see the code but not edit it?

- Just realized where the background editor was. That should be a part of the primary toolbar.

Otherwise really interesting, would be great for creating quick instruction manuals and simple product pages. Like someone else mentioned, I am waiting on ReadyMag for this kind of publishing tool, but I like where things are headed here moreso than some other editors I've come across.

kateray4• 14 years ago

Awesome, thanks for the feedback. Yeah, we're definitely still tweaking the design and some of these issues are just things we haven't gotten to yet (3 person team - we're hiring!).

We did have the toolbar vertically-aligned before, but found that it got in people's way a lot more when they were trying to design the page.

Also, I'm kate@scrollkit.com if there's anything else you come across, this stuff is super helpful for us.

jcromartie• 14 years ago

So, basically, "web publishing is broken because you have to do it on someone else's terms".

And then you say "use our stuff instead".

sp332• 14 years ago

Web publishing isn't broken because of the experience of making a page, it's broken because someone else determines the experience of visiting a page. This gives publishers control over the visitor's experience.

notJim4• 14 years ago

This was my initial reaction as well. Actually, as I find myself scrolling down the page, I thought the ideas were compelling. It was like this:

  [Facebook part     ]      Hmm… ok…

  [GO SLOWER         ]      Yeah!
  |-----   .... ---- |      YEAh!
  |.. ..... ------- .|      YEAH!
  
  [Make it meaningful]      Yeah!
  |.. ..... ---- .. .|      YEAH!
  
  [Join              ]      Wait… what? Join… your app?

I thought this was about hand-crafting. This is just another ad for a service that will be acquihired in 2 months?

FUCK.THAT.

kateray4• 14 years ago

these are the ideas behind scroll kit and i'm glad you agree with them. but we'd be some pretty shitty hackers if we just talked about them and weren't trying to actually DO something to change things.

nbashaw• 14 years ago

Not everyone knows (or wants to learn) HTML & CSS. I can see this service being valuable for those people

alttag2• 14 years ago

I didn't even make it that far. [EDIT:Although, wanting to comment, I did go back and read the whole thing.]

"make them scroll" ... um, no. The increasing number of pages that are requiring vertical scroll to be useful loses the great usability/accessibility of the "above the fold" method of pages. Even with the improvements in scrolling over the past decade (scroll wheel mice and scrolling gestures), it's still a chore that makes the "cost" tradeoff of some sites (including, I'll admit, this one) to be "not worth the effort."

codybrown5• 14 years ago

You're able to build a completely unique site from a blank page in scroll kit. You are given a text form in other publishing platforms. Those are pretty different terms.

state3• 14 years ago

A large part of the value of the web is in creating _structured_ data. I would be amenable to a proposition that gave people more creative tools for publishing on those terms, but I think you're missing the point of the medium.

digitalengineer• 14 years ago

Reminds me of Easel: https://www.easel.io/ Nice.

anigbrowl• 14 years ago

You had me until 'Login with Facebook'. It's the new 'Connect with us on AOL'.

nollidge• 14 years ago

This one reason I don't read blog articles in an RSS feed. I aggregate them with one, but follow links to the blog owner's site so that I'm reading their content as they designed it.

wmeredith• 14 years ago

I did the same thing until I found Newsblur. It lets you read them all in one place, but retains original formatting. It's sick.

thebigshane• 14 years ago

  It's sick

Sometimes I really hate the English language. I think in highschool I remembered which adjectives meant good and which meant bad, but now they all completely confuse me. Hella, bad, the sarcastic awesome, wicked, twisted, ...

-- a twenty-something curmudgeon.

cgil• 14 years ago

It's a very nice idea, I would love to see more creativity in the web, but I don't think I agree with the implementation or what I see as the user base. Every blog page is not just a template, it's someone's vision of the world. It's an identity and a brand that the blogger tries to create and extend to its users. Using this new style the blogger would completely lose any form of identity and become more of a sparkling instagram knockoff than a medium to share rich content to its user base.

cws2• 14 years ago

Yeah. One thing scroll kit does really well is allows the screen to be filled with a single idea/image/composition. I haven't seen a lot of sites experiment with serving ads that way though.

sequoia2• 14 years ago

I didn't get the CTA at the end. Join... what? I'm totally unclear about what I'm joining. I like the sentiment of the project: "back to DIY, one-off, unique pages- like in magazines!" but I don't understand how signing up for... something (?) will help me do this.

Throw me a bone: show me a bit -at least a video- of what you're offering before asking me to sign up.

codybrown5• 14 years ago

the video is right above the join button.

sequoia2• 14 years ago

There is a youtube link with a thumbnail of a bear and some fire and lasers or something, I assumed it was decorative because most of the visual aspects of the site are.

Upon further investigation you can try the tool right on the page, I just didn't know this because there was no CTA for it, as there was no "See it in action!" CTA over the video. Startupers pitching your project to users: make it as simple as possible to see your value prop- don't make me work for it :)

evanlivingston• 14 years ago

Wait, Is there really a picture of blonde girl standing in front of a bunch of Asians with the title 'Make it meaningful'? What message is being conveyed here?

petercooper3• 14 years ago

The ethos here reminds me a lot of the edgier elements of the Web design community in the 1997-2002 period. For some reason, a lot of it died out after that, but there was a real enthusiasm to do some magical stuff and large collectives like the Swank Army were putting out amazing and experimental work (often leaning on early CSS and gigantic nests of tables). I'd love to see that culture come back to the Web in a big way.

tdonia• 14 years ago

Anyone remember dreamless? This reminds me of the meaningless css wars. In a good way.

state3• 14 years ago

Yeah, I remember. Dreamless was a truly ad-hoc institution though, and the tools people used to participate were all freely available and took some effort to use and understand. The aesthetic is similar, but I think the sentiment here is really different.

petercooper3• 14 years ago

Was that the discussion site where they didn't sanitize embedded CSS..? So when you loaded the page, it kept changing style because every commenter had overridden styles?

jff• 14 years ago

I certainly go slower when I try to scroll down a scrollkit page!

jval• 14 years ago

I really like this idea.

Isn't HN meant to be the kind of place to share this stuff? I love the philosophy behind it, I feel like these guys are having a serious crack at building something that ordinary designers can use to make really beautiful pages without needing to know how to code.

The design of that page is really compelling and tasteful. Neatly showcases what the platform can do while retaining your attention.

And as for the haters, all I can say is - if you made it to the bottom of the page then they are definitely doing something right. I'm sure if you were part of their target market the final flourish would work too and you would be keen to sign up.

Show HN: A Handcrafted Web

Related Stories