SNOWFLAKE
Software is an art. Project SNOWFLAKE is an experiment to prove this through beautiful, minimalistic user interfaces. By suggesting alternate designs to some of most popular sites, this project wants to raise awareness on quality, beautiful, elegant human user interfaces.
Check out some proposals below. Few popular sites were targeted a part of this independent experiment. All showcased proposals are fully responsive, and typographically adaptive. These serve to demonstrate how elegant can a user interface be while retaining all of it's usefulness. Every proposed user interface is carefully crafted and details attended with deep thought. As is often the case, many beautiful user interfaces do exist. Some notable mentions will continue to get added in showcase below.
SNOWFLAKE's dream is to strive for beauty through human software user interfaces, promoting it towards a status equal to that of art or music.
Google Search
Quite honestly, the best example since Internet came along, Google's search page was unarguably the simplest. Over time Google's page has struggled to keep up looking fresh while not compromising it's originality as the best search engine.
In recent years however their page looks like a hasty patchup of various links back to Google's products. The convenience of offerring more services at a click seems to definitely override the search page's main purpose - search.
An alternative user interface can still enhance Google's reputation as a search engine, keeping away items of secondary importance neatly tucked under it's own famous logo.
Calendar
Can a calendar be simple enough to give one piece of information - What date is today? Keeping up with the aim of answering this single simple question, Calendar sports an elegant, beautiful user interface.
No additional information, no urge to complicate, calendar focuses on a seamless, subtle, clean user interface. Totally responsive typography to match any device!
Mozilla
Mozilla is a great example of responsive, adaptive web design.
Everything on Mozilla's page expresses clean, sleek interface, grabbing attention to just the right hilights on their website. A great example to learn, understand and follow on. Although not fully responsive on IE (hey!), Mozilla's own Firefox is the browser I use to test out responsive web designs (
Ctrl + Shift + Manyone?) myself. I see alot more can be done to take it away from mouse assumed interaction to an engaged touch action.The idea of tucking away menus under their logo is one subtle, elegant aspect I want to hilight upon. Making logo's mean something is a great chance to encourage peple to touch your brand, not just glance at it.
Font Awesome
Wait, what? Could it be possible to suggest how Font Awesome's layout can be simplified?
Font Awesome is an excellent companion to use with Bootstrap. Both of these are key pillars of my own designs. They take care of responsive web designs, iconography in a neat, compact manner.
If there is any way I could offer my gratitude to these, perhaps this would be one way I can think of.