Ambient CSS v3 – Blender meets CSS

__alexs

This has mid 2000's LiteStep theme vibes.

drcongo

You see a lot of this kind of look in AUv3 plugins on the iPad and I love it - it's so nice to have visually tactile interfaces rather than the flat shit that OSs have been forcing on us.

varispeed

Looks cool, but I can't see myself using something like this. The readability is poor, it is difficult to gauge if button was pressed or what is selected. But still, I love it!

isodev

I love the concept but (at least on mobile Safari) most of it feels unusable.

troupo

Isn't this just short-lived neumorphic design from a few years back? https://neumorphism.io/#e0e0e0

graypegg

Nitpick, but elevation would make much more sense if you assumed a base plane + set a perspective, and then translate3d'd upwards on the Z axis. It would grow the size of the element as well. Saying that, probably annoying to work with transformed DOM nodes, but the background being the only thing moving in the "bounce" example just stood out to me as weird. Also, the texures seem to be just gradients or embedded texture data. Was thinking this would use https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/V... and fall back to gradients/premade images for firefox.

CSSer

I really dislike how the dribbble/envato style somehow escaped containment into Claude and now I’m seeing it everywhere mixed with mediocre design layouts. I think to myself that maybe stuff like this will help counteract that but then I see it in use with 12px typography (the kubernetes 3D dashboard thing) and I recoil in horror. Please consider this a PSA: Claude doesn’t understand UX or good design principles out of the box. Please go hug a designer.

alexaholic

We used to do this during the Web 2.0 era with PNGs, GIFs and `progid:DXImageTransform` because back then you couldn't do it with standard CSS alone. Then as CSS (and MS!) evolved to enable it, the world moved on to flat UIs. It's ironic, isn't it?

tuvix

Reminds me of VST GUIs, looks great! But, like other commenters have noted, I think a number of these controls might be desktop only, which is totally fine. There’s too much UI stuff centered around mobile anyway these days

inexcf

God this site has atrocious scrolling behavior. Allowing me to scroll halfway to the next "page" but then forcing me to stop scrolling and start again to get to the next one made me close the page half way through.

charlesrice

My favorite is the knobs where some of them you can grab and rotate like they are physical but other ones only react to the vertical position of the cursor so you feel like a crazy person trying to use them

irickt

https://github.com/kikkupico/ambientcss

Quitschquat

Why must UI/UX be a fashion. I knew this skeuomorphic shit would return eventually.

noduerme

I wrote something a bit like this years ago as an experimental portfolio site... a sort of responsive engine managing flat "cards" with CSS shadow cues for depth. (The responsive aspects are all JS on a loop that tweens everything). Ever since Photoshop released drop shadows on the world, I've generally thought that their overuse was a way to mask bad design, but I thought it was interesting at the time to see how far you could get using only drop shadows. Note: This site hasn't been updated in a decade. Not made for dark mode. https://thestrikeagency.com

TechSquidTV

I had tried (and failed) to do something similar. https://analogui.com/

wasmperson

The keyboard controls to select a radio button shouldn't depend on the visual orientation of the radio buttons. Browsers get this right by default, but the radio buttons aren't implemented with `<input type="radio">` and instead are just a row of plain buttons and a bunch of javascript. A quick check in the dev tools confirms the other widgets are similarly implemented :( I love the look, though!

dvt

Skeuomorphism is back, baby! Apart from the wonky dragging on some of the knobs, I really like these. Kind of reminds me of teenage engineering.

BugsJustFindMe

Nobody who cares about UX adds virtual knobs to flat interfaces.

wigster

is it too much to ask for a button in a different colour to the background. ffs

mminer237

Neat idea, but feels very poorly made. The light direction governs the whole grid for some reason but stops outside an arbitrary div and often just stops working period, on top of feeling laggy for such a simple effect. Channels are messed up. The example doesn't seem to work, while in the video it just makes two edges white for some reason? The color options and textures are kinda ugly. The glass colors clearly just don't work. "Brass" turns into "Olive" on the last one for no reason? The radio buttons are a bad idea for a digital interface, implemented completely inconsistently(‽), and the middle one just doesn't work at all. Buttons have virtually no feedback if they're pressed or not. Reminds me a lot of Google's material design, at least the older versions of it, just much sloppier and less usable and less colorful.