Websites Worth a Second Coffee
Social feeds are one way to spend a break, but a handful of small, well-crafted websites can be far more rewarding. The best ones don't need to be practical tools; their value is in the experience — a moment of surprise, a new fact, or a story that sticks. The following sites, each with its own character, are worth keeping open in a tab for the next lull in the day.
Plants, Catalogued by Care Level
Bringing life into an office often starts with a trip to the plant shop, but choosing the right one can be a gamble. How Many Plants removes the guesswork with a comprehensive, alphabetically sorted guide to popular houseplants. The listings can be filtered by care difficulty, size, placement, and pet-friendliness, making it a handy reference for both beginners and those who have accidentally killed a fern or two.
An Archive of Quarantine Art
Art has a way of capturing a moment in time. The Covid Art Museum does exactly that for the pandemic era. This online exhibition collects 238 contributions from artists around the world, each piece reflecting on isolation, change, and the altered perception of daily life.
A Museum of Modern Frustrations
Anyone who has wrestled with a poorly designed form or spent ages on hold will recognize the exhibits in the Museum of Annoying Experiences. Set in the year 3000, the museum treats today's customer service pitfalls as relics of a bygone age. Each interactive exhibit turns a common source of friction — from confusing CAPTCHAs to unhelpful support lines — into something playful.
A Jukebox for Different Eras
For a trip through global music history, Radiooooo offers a vast collection of songs searchable by country and decade. You can dial in a specific mood, filtering by slow, fast, or "weird" tracks, or leave the selection to a shuffle mode curated by the site's editors. A free account unlocks this time-traveling playlist tool.
Debunking Common UX Beliefs
Design wisdom often solidifies into dogma without much scrutiny. The project 10 misconceptions on UX takes a contrarian look at widely held assumptions about infinite scrolling, homepage accessibility, and mobile-first strategies. The site presents its arguments with a strong point of view, but it's a playful way to explore the nuances behind common design heuristics. For a broader reference, Jon Yablonski's Laws of UX collects principles like Hick's Law and the Zeigarnik Effect, providing a well-organized foundation of design psychology.
A Timeline of the Web's Evolution
Following the web's rapid evolution can be disorienting. Jay Hoffman's The History of the Web, illustrated by Katerina Limpitsouni, charts the key milestones from early scripting languages to the end of Flash. This continuously updated timeline provides an accessible overview for anyone wanting to see how we got from there to here.
Office Ambience for the Home Workspace
For those missing the background noise of a shared office, I Miss The Office provides a gentle substitute. The site generates the typical sounds of a workplace — typing, creaking chairs, and the hum of a watercooler — to help recreate a familiar atmosphere at home.
A Graphic Novel of Escape and Memory
Some stories demand a slower pace. “The Boat,” based on Nam Le's short story, is an interactive graphic novel that blends animation, audio, and ink drawings. It follows Mai, a girl sent alone to Australia by boat after the Vietnam War. The carefully crafted atmosphere carries the weight of fear, despair, and hope throughout this exceptional piece of online storytelling.
14 Billion Years in Points of Light
History becomes an abstract constellation in Histography. This interactive timeline plots events from the Big Bang to the 2010s, with each dot representing a moment sourced from Wikipedia. Users can zoom through eras or search for particular events, offering a unique visual perspective on the full sweep of recorded time. Originally a student project from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, it remains a striking example of creative data visualization.
The Original Star Wars in One Giant Scroll
Illustrator Martin Panchaud spent over 1000 hours creating SWANH, a massive infographic that recounts the plot of “Star Wars: A New Hope.” Composed of 157 images from 22 Illustrator files, the piece stretches over 123 meters when viewed end-to-end. Beyond its impressive scale and attention to detail, SWANH stands as a deliberate counterpoint to the web's preference for bite-sized, instantly consumable content.
Bite-Sized Pages of Design History
Short attention spans meet trivia in Shane Bzok's Design Facts. With over 130 entries, the site shares obscure stories from design history. Did you know Salvador Dali designed the Chupa Chups logo in 1969, or that the Chanel logo's interlocking C's have roots in a French vineyard? These are just a few of the details Bzok has gathered for quick viewing.
Relics of Tactile Interface Design
The aesthetic of vintage electronics holds a distinct appeal. Stephen Coles and Norman Hathaway have curated a collection on Tumblr dedicated to this design era. The archive includes everything from classic car dashboards to 1980s tech magazine covers and retro-futuristic concepts like an early smartwatch. It works as a fascinating dive into the history of physical interface design.
Interactive Fun with a Friendly Menagerie
For a light-hearted distraction, the WebGL experiment “Moments of Happiness” from EPIC Agency is a good place to start. The site features a lion and several other handcrafted animals that react to your mouse, offering playful interactions with a sneezing dragon, a cat, and a rabbit. Built with Three.js and the GSAP library, experiments like this often come with source codes available on Codepen, though they may not be fully optimized for all browsers.
Seeing in Black and White
Designer Tom Wysocki curates The Afrix, a Tumblr that pairs strict geometric shapes with more fluid, organic forms in a strictly monochrome palette. It's a refined source of inspiration, mixing portfolio designs with abstract illustrations and digital experiments, creating a balanced display of work.
An Animated Alphabet
Design agency Studio Lovelock brings a child’s-eye view of the world to life with “A Is For Albert.” The project pairs each letter from A to Z with a short animated scene featuring Albert, a young boy whose explorations of his home are equal parts endearing and chaotic. Using simple geometric shapes and a soft color palette, the site turns everyday mishaps — decorating the wallpaper, hugging the family cat a little too hard — into charming vignettes that are easy to smile at.
Old Maps, New Eyes
The National Library of Scotland offers a unique way to view history: a browser-based tool that works like a digital spyglass. You can hover over a modern map of Great Britain, Scotland, England, or Wales and see what the same spot looked like roughly a century ago. It’s a straightforward concept that gives an immediate sense of how places change over time.
Testing Your Design Eye
The team at UX and web development studio Supremo has built a game called It’s Centred That that challenges your ability to spot perfectly centered elements. You’re shown a series of shapes with a dot, and you have to judge whether that dot is truly in the middle. What sounds simple becomes tricky quickly — the game runs for 10 levels and will likely humble even confident designers.
An Archive of Islamic Ornament
David Wade has spent years collecting and sharing the rich tradition of Islamic architectural decoration. His site, Pattern in Islamic Art, hosts more than 4,000 images of patterns and design elements drawn from this artistic heritage. It’s a valuable resource for anyone interested in the visual complexity of these works and the mathematical and geometric structures behind them.
Vintage Print Inspiration
The team at Present & Correct has gathered a curated collection of print design treasures, many of which are available online. Highlights include covers from East Germany’s Form + Zweck, published from 1956 to 1990, as well as the Swiss typographic journal Typographische Monatsblätter. For a bolder look, there’s the Japanese Industrial Art News with its vibrant cover art. More contemporary work can be found through the IDEA magazine archive, which lets you browse past issues by keyword.
A Pattern Gallery for Every Taste
For those seeking a more eclectic mix of visual inspiration, Pattern Collect is worth a visit. The site brings together illustrated patterns by designers from around the world, spanning a wide range of colors, forms, and styles. You can filter the showcase by tag, and each piece links back to its original post on Dribbble or Behance, making it easy to discover illustrators you might want to work with.
Hands-On History of Personal Computing
The open-source PCjs project is a browser-based time machine for early personal computers. It lets you run faithful simulations of machines like the original IBM PC from 1981 and the OSI Challenger 1P from 1978. These are not just static displays — you can actually interact with them, typing commands and running software directly in your browser. The simulations are built entirely in JavaScript and need no external plugins.
The pre-configured systems are ready to boot BASIC, DOS, Windows 1.01, and various other programs. For more granular control, you can even build your own machine from component options. The goal of the project is to make early computing accessible for experimentation and to offer a platform for running and analyzing older software.
Album Covers, Sorted by Hex
Album Colors Of The Year offers a deliberate look at the cover art of 2020 by arranging releases according to their dominant hues. For example, Lady Gaga’s “Chromatica” is mapped to #ed4c73, Suuns’ “Fiction” to #e489b3, and Avalon Emerson’s “DJ-Kicks” to #f8bb04. It’s a fun way to see album artwork treated as a color palette and may lead you to rediscover music you’ve missed.
Teletext, Preserved and Playable
For those nostalgic for the bold graphics and blocky text of teletext, the Teletext Museum is a prime destination. The gallery showcases screens from teletext services around the world, offering a visual history of how this interface evolved over the years. The accompanying timeline explains key changes in the medium’s development.
If you’re interested in a more hands-on approach, Jason Robertson has dedicated significant effort to recovering old teletext transmissions from VHS cassettes. His work has resulted in a large collection of teletext pages from the 1980s and 1990s, some of which can be edited directly in the browser. It takes a moment to figure out the controls, but it’s a rewarding way to experience a pre-web form of digital publishing.
A Visual Timeline of Artists’ Lives
What were the defining moments in the lives of Picasso, Dalí, or Miró? A collaboration between information designer Giorgia Lupi, her team at Accurat, and illustrator Michaela Buttignol seeks to answer that question with a series of infographics for ten famous painters. Each graphic boils a biography down to key events — births, deaths, marriages, travels — and pairs them with more personal data points like astrological sign and handedness. The designs mirror each artist’s own style by using characteristic colors and visual motifs.
Alongside the visualization project, Giorgia Lupi has written an article on the aesthetics of data narratives that offers deeper insight into the thinking behind such engaging presentations.
A Virtual Journey Through the British Museum
The British Museum, with collections spanning over 2,000,000 years of history, is vast. To make its treasures accessible globally, it partnered with Google to create the Museum Of The World. This WebGL-based experience is designed for the desktop, offering an exploratory interface where you can move through time and across continents to see artefacts arranged by type and region.
When Kids’ Ideas Meet Professional Illustrators
The Monster Project began with a simple premise: have elementary school students draw monsters, then ask professional illustrators to reinterpret those sketches in their own styles. The results are playful and often surprising. The project’s goal is to show children the worth of their own creative ideas, and with over 100 finished monsters on display, it’s a sizable and inspiring gallery.
Further Reading
- The Importance Of Graceful Degradation In Accessible Interface Design
- How To Design An Effective Mobile Landing Page
- Building For Mobile: RWD, PWA, AMP Or Instant Articles?
- An Ode To Side Project Time
