- S-TIER blogs are those that are animated, visual, interactive and absolutely blow your mind off
- A-TIER are highly informative and you ll learn something
- opinion blogs at the absolute bottom of the tier list because everyone everywhere ll always have an opinion about everything and my life is too short to be reading all that
- these are the BEST of the BEST, you ll be blown away opening each page is how good they are. i am thinking of creating a bookmark manager that uses my criteria above and runs across every damn blog link ever posted on HN to categorize them as S-TIER, A-TIER, opinion and so on
- require 3 clicks and 10 seconds to navigate to a subpage. No indication whether it's trying to load or not (growingswe)
- have underlined headers that are not links (mlu-explain)
- hijack scrolling, the back button and navigation history (seeing-theory)
I do not disagree these blogs are awesome. Of these I knew ciechanow.ski and lumafield - famous and exceptional. Just... I feel a bit disappointed when someone pumps excitement, and your first experience with the websites are either weird design choices or bad UX, intentionally or not.
i didnt notice any difference in the scrolling part. how did you conclude it is hijacking the scroll. Also the other sites load fine for me. Also this is not about performance. I dont care if they take 10 seconds to load but the content to be presented in a way unlike any of the 451534856415348678513656 other blogs out there
I have more. You can keep rolling the dice on https://indieblog.page/random and eventually you'll stumble across some pretty sites. Usually the nicest ones are from frontend / design engineer types of people. EDIT - oh and the sites in the internet phone book! https://internetphonebook.net/ as well as browsing screenshots at https://personalsit.es/
Some of these sites - wow. I literally can’t fall asleep right now (reading this in bed) scrolling through all these. So many good resources. Thank you for sharing. This is why I love HN
One I like is Tom Macwright’s blog [1], which somewhat famously loads insanely fast thanks to having a sort of the web equivalent of a brutalist design while still looking nice [2].
There might have been few more such blogs over the years but this one has stayed in memory long after I stopped going to it and eventually it stopped (sort of). It was not just the design but also the simplicty of the conent and being very accessible.
https://allaboutberlin.com is optimised for readability and ease of navigation. That's what a website should do, although I love when bloggers use their own art in the designs.
This isn't a blog, but more than 20 years ago I saw a Flash web game which I've always remembered as the most beautiful piece of interactive online content I'd ever seen.
It took a while to find it again... (I searched Google images until I found a screenshot that looked right.) Somebody archived it and resurrected it with Ruffle. (It looks better if you go to "Full Screen" mode.) But the aesthetic was just incredible...
I like how readable it is. Be sure to handle long lines that ruin page widths on small screens -- probably the commit hash should overflow-wrap: break-word, or in a horizontally scrollable container element, or a similar solution.
One designy thing I've been practicing is to be intentional about every margin / piece of whitespace, and to use a proportional scale like https://utopia.fyi/. You might find that if you align more elements and stick to the scale, things might look extra pleasing. (Maybe you already have, idk, just first impressions from my phone)
- subscribe button placement looks uneven, esp on mobile. Maybe it could be a simple underlined link?
- imo centered text is a crutch that often looks better when left justified instead, or rerranged with some other solution. I'm thinking of the mobile navbar and lengthy captions. This is more subjective tho
- homepage could use more posts! Looking forward to your future writing
- the most beautiful sites usually come up with some unique theme or visual identity or creative stunt to break away from a vanilla default theme. But people still like basic readable websites if the content is great.
there is noscript fallback if required with the same content. I have nice background mouse effect going on against the backdrop also it is no built as just a portfolio landing, it is built as an spa with plans for expansion much more. Needed to give myself the flexibility
I have been having a great time using Astro with https://github.com/lucernae/astro-blog-template . Looks modern and minimal, but not too minimal which i despise. On the technical side of things, Static Site Generation is perfect for small blogs, so after some tweaks I got its loading times down to milliseconds! Here's the blog I came up with: https://blog.cellutils.com/
- S-TIER blogs are those that are animated, visual, interactive and absolutely blow your mind off
- A-TIER are highly informative and you ll learn something
- opinion blogs at the absolute bottom of the tier list because everyone everywhere ll always have an opinion about everything and my life is too short to be reading all that
- these are the S-TIER ones on my system
- https://growingswe.com/blog
- https://ciechanow.ski/archives/
- https://mlu-explain.github.io/
- https://seeing-theory.brown.edu/index.html#firstPage
- https://svg-tutorial.com/
- https://www.lumafield.com/scan-of-the-month/health-wearables
- these are the BEST of the BEST, you ll be blown away opening each page is how good they are. i am thinking of creating a bookmark manager that uses my criteria above and runs across every damn blog link ever posted on HN to categorize them as S-TIER, A-TIER, opinion and so on
May I nitpick? Why do BEST of the BEST
- require 3 clicks and 10 seconds to navigate to a subpage. No indication whether it's trying to load or not (growingswe)
- have underlined headers that are not links (mlu-explain)
- hijack scrolling, the back button and navigation history (seeing-theory)
I do not disagree these blogs are awesome. Of these I knew ciechanow.ski and lumafield - famous and exceptional. Just... I feel a bit disappointed when someone pumps excitement, and your first experience with the websites are either weird design choices or bad UX, intentionally or not.
Anyway, thanks for sharing!
i didnt notice any difference in the scrolling part. how did you conclude it is hijacking the scroll. Also the other sites load fine for me. Also this is not about performance. I dont care if they take 10 seconds to load but the content to be presented in a way unlike any of the 451534856415348678513656 other blogs out there
- https://mlu-explain.github.io/
- https://seeing-theory.brown.edu/index.html#firstPage
- https://svg-tutorial.com/
Too amazing
An advent calendar as a way to learn something like svgs is such a neat idea.
Tasteful: https://colly.com/
Artsy: https://anhvn.com/
Simple yet elegant: https://www.lkhrs.com/ and https://arun.is/blog/
Maximalist: https://henry.codes/ and https://garden.bradwoods.io/ and https://blog.maximeheckel.com/
Old-school / indie web: https://ribo.zone/
Text mode / ASCII art: https://adelfaure.net/
Typography: http://davidcole.me/ and https://www.petemillspaugh.com/
I have more. You can keep rolling the dice on https://indieblog.page/random and eventually you'll stumble across some pretty sites. Usually the nicest ones are from frontend / design engineer types of people. EDIT - oh and the sites in the internet phone book! https://internetphonebook.net/ as well as browsing screenshots at https://personalsit.es/
Some of these sites - wow. I literally can’t fall asleep right now (reading this in bed) scrolling through all these. So many good resources. Thank you for sharing. This is why I love HN
Some of the Websites literally took my breath away. I mean just wow all of the sites in the lists are.
I hadn't seen arun.is before; I really like this one! Thanks for the share!
- https://henry.codes/
- https://www.fev.al/
- https://hugo.blog/
I just like this type of typography.
Brilliant
One I like is Tom Macwright’s blog [1], which somewhat famously loads insanely fast thanks to having a sort of the web equivalent of a brutalist design while still looking nice [2].
[1] https://macwright.com/
[2] https://macwright.com/2016/05/03/the-featherweight-website
Tom is the best
https://www.joshwcomeau.com
I prefer simple designs.
Steph Ango's website comes to my mind: https://stephango.com/ramblings
I guess I also really like my own: https://bryanhogan.com/
I also realised writing this, 3 other pages I wanted to share didn't include a blog (1. https://www.yasmins.site/projects 2. https://www.alasdairmonk.com/ 3.https://glenn.me/ ).
Very artsy but also nice: https://www.nicchan.me/about/
The typography in Maggie Appleton's blog is unparalleled
https://maggieappleton.com/
Favorite! Both aesthetics and content!
One of my personal favorites: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com
https://lynnandtonic.com/ is really well-built and has a distinctive style. Recommend checking it out!
https://onethingwell.org comes to mind
https://web.archive.org/web/20170608203825/http://onethingwe... - used to be slightly simpler and less colourful.
There might have been few more such blogs over the years but this one has stayed in memory long after I stopped going to it and eventually it stopped (sort of). It was not just the design but also the simplicty of the conent and being very accessible.
Ah darn, someone already mentioned Maggie Appleton's website. It's simply gorgeous.
https://allaboutberlin.com is optimised for readability and ease of navigation. That's what a website should do, although I love when bloggers use their own art in the designs.
Ah I forgot to put your site in my typography category! https://nicolasbouliane.com/ so elegant and well executed
It's a shameless rip-off of Maggie's website, but done too lazily to be noticeable. The colour palette was literally the same until recently.
This isn't a blog, but more than 20 years ago I saw a Flash web game which I've always remembered as the most beautiful piece of interactive online content I'd ever seen.
It took a while to find it again... (I searched Google images until I found a screenshot that looked right.) Somebody archived it and resurrected it with Ruffle. (It looks better if you go to "Full Screen" mode.) But the aesthetic was just incredible...
I give you -- "A Murder of Scarecrows."
https://www.gamesflow.com/jeux.php?id=2062366
There are some great looking websites here! I like https://vmfunc.re/
While this might be pushing it, some have had blogs on it.. but, I will love the UI.
https://www.yourworldoftext.com
https://simonsarris.com/
Ah yes I forgot about that one, nice. Reminds me of https://www.fromjason.xyz/
I'm gonna use this as an opportunity to get some feedback on mine: https://ayman.eldidi.org/articles/unicode-identifiers/
I like how readable it is. Be sure to handle long lines that ruin page widths on small screens -- probably the commit hash should overflow-wrap: break-word, or in a horizontally scrollable container element, or a similar solution.
One designy thing I've been practicing is to be intentional about every margin / piece of whitespace, and to use a proportional scale like https://utopia.fyi/. You might find that if you align more elements and stick to the scale, things might look extra pleasing. (Maybe you already have, idk, just first impressions from my phone)
- subscribe button placement looks uneven, esp on mobile. Maybe it could be a simple underlined link?
- imo centered text is a crutch that often looks better when left justified instead, or rerranged with some other solution. I'm thinking of the mobile navbar and lengthy captions. This is more subjective tho
- homepage could use more posts! Looking forward to your future writing
- the most beautiful sites usually come up with some unique theme or visual identity or creative stunt to break away from a vanilla default theme. But people still like basic readable websites if the content is great.
Mine is pretty cool looking: https://thomashunter.name/posts/2026-02-26-alpaka-elements-t...
Maybe not the best, but I like the direction Luke Smith takes with his site: https://lukesmith.xyz
I like minimal UI so https://szymonkaliski.com/ is my absolute favorite.
Not sure if it counts as “most beautiful”, but I spent a lot of time tinkering with my own blog UI and interactions:
https://simonaking.com
For me, it is ! Very impressive
Wow!
I’m not sure about “most beautiful”, but I’m particularly proud of my own site:
https://bryson.cc
Nice. One snag, your About link on the homepage points to your test site: https://bryson.test/about
Minor nit, so sorry if it comes across as snobbish or something:
You may want to spell "résumé" with the accents. I believe that is the technically correct spelling.
The amount of people promoting their own LLM generated blog has derailed this thread
Shoutout to my own: https://www.tyleo.com
I think Eric Meyer's is a nice one:
https://meyerweb.com/
Very esthetic.
https://danluu.com
i recently did a overhaul of mine and I love it, i think can compete with the best https://chetangangappa.me
Why does it require Javascript to display some text and images? Can't you do that without JS?
there is noscript fallback if required with the same content. I have nice background mouse effect going on against the backdrop also it is no built as just a portfolio landing, it is built as an spa with plans for expansion much more. Needed to give myself the flexibility
I have been having a great time using Astro with https://github.com/lucernae/astro-blog-template . Looks modern and minimal, but not too minimal which i despise. On the technical side of things, Static Site Generation is perfect for small blogs, so after some tweaks I got its loading times down to milliseconds! Here's the blog I came up with: https://blog.cellutils.com/
I quite like this one: https://tonsky.me/blog/monitors/
Although it is a bit slow to load sometimes.
I just finished building mine! https://gpeake.com
* gwern
* lesswrong
lesswrong, the Rationalist cult blog?
I’m disappointed to see how few of these sites contain a link, or at least one I could find easily, to an RSS feed.
This is rage-bait. Everyone knows discussing design will just end in someone mentioning Hitler :D