Item — HN Reader

Nice readability and blazing fast to me. That's awesome.

It reminded me of how good is the performance and design of the UK design system https://design-system.service.gov.uk/

Hope that at some point they can hire an illustrator to make some custom illustrations with more personality.

2 comments

For me the UK design system page was half cookie banner, half “get started” pop up (which afaict just lets you through to the page you’re already on when you tap it. What’s the point?)

Hardly inspires confidence in this site as a shining example of simplicity and design…

As someone who gets easily upset by bad websites, I actually really don't mind those banners. Why? Because it's extremely smooth and easy to scroll past them.

If I tried to scroll and they followed me, and it was all laggy, then yes it would be pretty bad.

I couldn’t scroll past either of them. They both occupied fixed positions in the viewport, and I couldn’t see a single pixel of the rest of the site until I not only made a decision about cookies, but also tapped the “get started” button which allowed me to see the page I was already on.

Edit: after trying the page again in a private tab, you’re right, you can scroll past it. But I had no idea that was the case when I first saw the site. Because the banners occupy the exact size of the viewport (I assume this is intentional) there is no indication that scrolling is even possible. You just have a huge set of banners taking up your whole screen. I stand by my statement that this is a terrible example of good design.

Only criticism i have is i ended up on a search form and after submitting to it the page reloaded and the results were below the fold. Otherwise yep, very fast and clean.