And producing them was very easy even in the pre-CSS days.
At the very worst (which is what I did), make up a simple image in Adobe with a 3D effect, save it as a black-and-white bitmap, change the white to the color of the button. The make a second version in the same manner, but this time the shading of the button reversed.
Nexty setup the HTML so the on-press for the link pulled up the alternate button image. The reversed shading (when done properly) then looked like it was depressed.
Is that so much harder than adding the JavaScript and other code around it to make the simple animation some sites have? (At least with the on-press option, it didn’t require having JavaScript active just to animate some buttons.)
Even better, how about those capacitive buttons that look like computer buttons in the real world, only even less visually distinct, and have absolutely no force feedback, depressing motion, or any other feedback whatsoever that you've pressed an actual button?
In other news, though, I believe the HN button is just an HTML button, with a touch of font styling on it from HN. Linux on a Chrome-descended browser I'm just getting a grey box with a black outline, no 3D styling. It's not styled that way by HN. Everything else in the CSS properties for me is showing as "user agent stylesheet", e.g., the defaults.
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 have always felt that the button in the last couple version of Windows was a bit off. This page confirms it: Old school buttons used to stay in a "selected" state after being pressed, but that was not implemented in Windows 8's new UI.
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.
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
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.
Exactly, and more broadly ALL of them are a variation of bgcolor + border-radius + padding + font (type, size). No funky shape, borders, FX, 3D / relief or even shadow, pixels... Every single one is a flat, round borders.
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.
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?
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."
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.
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.
Funny, it reminds me of War Of The Buttons, a famous French movie from 1962, where kids would cut out buttons from their enemies as a war trophy, and stash them.
Im blown away by how ugly they all are. The worse part is that this is what users expect now. If you so much as put an icon on the corner they cant find the button anymore.
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
just like the site's author :D
Maybe something like tvtropes.com, but for web application design, and of course with visual examples.
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
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
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?
MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES
SUBJECT: Adversarial Distillation of Frontier UI Buttons
The United States leads the world in user interface (UI) technologies. That lead reflects decades of foundational design research, bold aesthetic risk-taking, and millions of hours of front-end development. Our button leadership drives click-through rates, strengthens conversion funnels, and advances the frontiers of e-commerce, digital art, and human-computer interaction. The interactive breakthroughs emerging from original designers raise aesthetic standards, expand interactivity, and improve user experiences around the world.
However, we have information indicating that a specific actor, principally based in Hamburg, Germany—operating under the name Anatoly Zenkov—is engaged in a deliberate, industrial-scale campaign to distill frontier UI buttons. Leveraging inspect-element developer tools to bypass basic DOM protections and using extraction techniques to expose proprietary CSS and SVG information, this coordinated campaign systematically extracts hover states and active properties from target websites, exploiting U.S. design expertise and innovation.
Buttons developed from surreptitious, unauthorized distillation campaigns like this do not replicate the full performance of the original. They do, however, enable this actor to release consolidated web galleries that appear to perform comparably on select hover-state benchmarks at a fraction of the design cost. These distillation campaigns also allow the actor to deliberately strip functional JavaScript from the resulting buttons and undo mechanisms that ensure those UI elements actually submit forms, navigate pages, or add items to a shopping cart.
We remain committed to the free and fair development of web technologies across a competitive ecosystem, from leading frontier design systems to highly tuned CSS libraries, and from open-source frameworks to open-component models. UI distillation, when legitimately used via tutorials or CodePens to produce smaller, lighter-weight components from more advanced systems, is a vital part of that ecosystem. Industrial button-theft activities that aim to systematically undermine original designers are not.
There is nothing innovative about systematically extracting and copying the CSS of the design industry, and there is nothing open about supposedly open button galleries that are derived from acts of malicious UI exploitation. As methods to detect and mitigate industrial-scale element extraction grow more sophisticated, individuals in Hamburg who build their portfolios on such fragile foundations should have little confidence in the integrity and reliability of the buttons they produce.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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...
I have noticed on occasion websites with a missing button. Now I know what happened. Finally, closure.
You wouldn’t download a button
Does he have all the "No" buttons they seem in short supply?
The legend of the Button-Eater who comes out from his lair somewhere deep inside the Web.
I am so lucky, this guy only stole 2 "Yes" button from my Claude Code terminal. I still have enough "Yes" buttons to complete my grand project.
When did we stop making buttons that actually look like a button?
The bas-relief era of UI design now feels like a golden era, and the early "Aqua" versions of Mac OS X the ultimate evolution.
Everything since then feels like we're regressing.
The "add comment" button for this comment is literally a solid blue roundrect. It's not even obvious that it's clickable.
And producing them was very easy even in the pre-CSS days.
At the very worst (which is what I did), make up a simple image in Adobe with a 3D effect, save it as a black-and-white bitmap, change the white to the color of the button. The make a second version in the same manner, but this time the shading of the button reversed.
Nexty setup the HTML so the on-press for the link pulled up the alternate button image. The reversed shading (when done properly) then looked like it was depressed.
Is that so much harder than adding the JavaScript and other code around it to make the simple animation some sites have? (At least with the on-press option, it didn’t require having JavaScript active just to animate some buttons.)
Even better, how about those capacitive buttons that look like computer buttons in the real world, only even less visually distinct, and have absolutely no force feedback, depressing motion, or any other feedback whatsoever that you've pressed an actual button?
In other news, though, I believe the HN button is just an HTML button, with a touch of font styling on it from HN. Linux on a Chrome-descended browser I'm just getting a grey box with a black outline, no 3D styling. It's not styled that way by HN. Everything else in the CSS properties for me is showing as "user agent stylesheet", e.g., the defaults.
What a button look like to you? Blue roundrect sure says button to me.
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. :)
You might like this: https://nielssp.dk/guis/buttons
I have always felt that the button in the last couple version of Windows was a bit off. This page confirms it: Old school buttons used to stay in a "selected" state after being pressed, but that was not implemented in Windows 8's new UI.
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.
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
Oh wow, that was so cathartic. Thank you for sharing.
A few really nice buttons there, indeed. :)
Awesome, the Haiku one is my favorite
Indeed, 2000s are my fav globally
KDE 3.1 *chef's kiss*
Ubuntu 2020 wins, only one dark themed
Dark themes are for people who can't lower their screen brightness.
So interesting to see the contrast between OSX and Windows in 2001.
No wonder OSX felt like the future.
I miss the future.
For me the 2001 OSX looks wishy washy and does not have a professional look.
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.
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.
For me, Windows 3.x era buttons are the pinnacle of buttons.
What, no BeOS?! :)
Does Haiku count ?
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/
Exactly, and more broadly ALL of them are a variation of bgcolor + border-radius + padding + font (type, size). No funky shape, borders, FX, 3D / relief or even shadow, pixels... Every single one is a flat, round borders.
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.
They didn't copy any hold/hover states which is too bad, those are an integral part of a button IMO
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?
Earlier era for me actually. I'm a 90s person. :)
Also more generally called skeuomorphism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph
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)
https://jdan.github.io/98.css/
Apple and Jony Ive killed skeuomorph design a long time ago.
Web 2.0 was fun :-)
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!)
Why I third party? Aren’t the stolen buttons stored locally?
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.
:hover and :focus
there are others i think
Button components across major component galleries:
https://component.gallery/components/button/
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 also collect old Flash buttons from my archived version of flashkit: https://flashkitty.gzalo.com/Interfaces/Buttons/
If you blockchain your buttons they are much harder to steal.
Just putting this out there for those who are not in the know. This type of crisis is easily avoidable.
For inspiration, I prefer this one:
https://uiverse.io/buttons
https://uiverse.io/GreyD097/great-rat-93
wow
Doesn't work for me at all on iOS Safari?
That's the only interesting one. The rest are a snoozefest of corporate mediocrity.
Oh this reminds me that we used to create buttons for navigation in flash!
I don’t think it’s for animation, it’s to collect all the different buttons seen in the wild
Is there something similar, but for menus?
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.
None of them push your buttons, huh?
Funny, it reminds me of War Of The Buttons, a famous French movie from 1962, where kids would cut out buttons from their enemies as a war trophy, and stash them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Buttons_(1962_film)
The buttons (at 2:25) : https://youtu.be/O5StEEzpT04?t=145
That's rude. Give them back
Careful you might run afoul of the infinite scrolling laws.
Im blown away by how ugly they all are. The worse part is that this is what users expect now. If you so much as put an icon on the corner they cant find the button anymore.
I wish there was a way to exclude the plain ones (single color rectangle with rounded corners and text).
It would be cool to classify and categorize them so you could filter by attributes
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
just like the site's author :DMaybe something like tvtropes.com, but for web application design, and of course with visual examples.
I'm sad that buttons are no longer interesting.
I can’t look, so many arrows poorly aligned with text - how can these developers live with themselves!
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
They're usually done with SVGs or CSS pseudoelements (a clip-path polygon or borders and rotation) rather than Unicode arrows
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
And then the line wraps.
Alright I’ll take the bait, flex shrink none on the svg, white space no wrap on the text
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
It would be lovely to see some of those converted into enamelled metal badges.
Are we in flat design for way too long or is this a recent idea and the collection is also very recent?
It’s definitely been too long, since around 15 years ago.
MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES
SUBJECT: Adversarial Distillation of Frontier UI Buttons
The United States leads the world in user interface (UI) technologies. That lead reflects decades of foundational design research, bold aesthetic risk-taking, and millions of hours of front-end development. Our button leadership drives click-through rates, strengthens conversion funnels, and advances the frontiers of e-commerce, digital art, and human-computer interaction. The interactive breakthroughs emerging from original designers raise aesthetic standards, expand interactivity, and improve user experiences around the world.
However, we have information indicating that a specific actor, principally based in Hamburg, Germany—operating under the name Anatoly Zenkov—is engaged in a deliberate, industrial-scale campaign to distill frontier UI buttons. Leveraging inspect-element developer tools to bypass basic DOM protections and using extraction techniques to expose proprietary CSS and SVG information, this coordinated campaign systematically extracts hover states and active properties from target websites, exploiting U.S. design expertise and innovation.
Buttons developed from surreptitious, unauthorized distillation campaigns like this do not replicate the full performance of the original. They do, however, enable this actor to release consolidated web galleries that appear to perform comparably on select hover-state benchmarks at a fraction of the design cost. These distillation campaigns also allow the actor to deliberately strip functional JavaScript from the resulting buttons and undo mechanisms that ensure those UI elements actually submit forms, navigate pages, or add items to a shopping cart.
We remain committed to the free and fair development of web technologies across a competitive ecosystem, from leading frontier design systems to highly tuned CSS libraries, and from open-source frameworks to open-component models. UI distillation, when legitimately used via tutorials or CodePens to produce smaller, lighter-weight components from more advanced systems, is a vital part of that ecosystem. Industrial button-theft activities that aim to systematically undermine original designers are not.
There is nothing innovative about systematically extracting and copying the CSS of the design industry, and there is nothing open about supposedly open button galleries that are derived from acts of malicious UI exploitation. As methods to detect and mitigate industrial-scale element extraction grow more sophisticated, individuals in Hamburg who build their portfolios on such fragile foundations should have little confidence in the integrity and reliability of the buttons they produce.
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.
https://anatolyzenkov.com/stolen-buttons/button-stealer
Thanks. Gah I feel blind. I went back and it’s right there at the top
Ha there were a few buttons on the page that might’ve been distracting lol
610 buttons are anchor elements, and only 285 are actually real buttons.
It would be interesting if it was possible to sort them by similarity, width, height, shape, color, etc.
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.
Interesting choice to hotlink all the images! The side-effect is that some are dead now.
why stealing :) buttons are either circle, rectangle, or rounded rectangle :)
They used to be beveled or capsule shaped, after they were 2D.
You should deduplicate and offer a cluster view with similarity distance
You're visiting boring websites. I only saw one barely skeuomorphic button
Great, how are we supposed to use those websites now? No wonder web is breaking down
REJECT ALL
You made my day. What a joyful, weird, fun projec!
for sure. every day i come here hoping for something like this. something like the old milliondollarhomepage kind of things. i miss that stuff :)
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.
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.
A better time. Before flat material lameness and Corporate Memphis.
Yeah, let's take the remaining fun out of the web, everything needs to be gray and plain.
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.
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.
You can't steal buttons.
How do you explain this website containing all the stolen buttons then?
They are cloned. Stealing takes the original away.
It would be cool if you could steal them but that would probably be bad.
I suppose this is a healthier hobby than stealing hotel towels and ashtrays.
So few of them look clickable.
So this is basically the Thanos of web devs
People will do any useless thing to self-promote.
Well, it is somewhat entertaining.
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
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.
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...
Yoink
Very nice.
Now let’s see Paul Allen’s buttons
Haha, there was a post about 98.css the other day, I'm pretty sure it's one of those.
none of them work