Click any card to view the full page.
1–5: variations on a theme • 6–8: unexpected formats • 9–11: real apps • 12–15: different directions entirely
Linear Method-inspired. Dark theme, serif typography, numbered sections with table of contents. Interactive meal swap demo. Inline example boxes.
Humane by Design-inspired. Light theme with card layout. Each principle is a pattern with side-by-side "don't/do" panels showing mini UI recreations.
Warm paper tones. Each principle shown as a full-width split between "anxious software" and "calm software" with working app recreations in each panel.
The site practices what it preaches. Accordion sections start collapsed, revealing content on click. Light, literary typography. Minimal until you engage.
Case-study driven. Dark theme. Each section focuses on a software category (meal planning, notifications, habits, onboarding, dashboards) with lesson boxes.
The entire manifesto presented as a man page inside a terminal emulator. Principles shown as git diffs (anxious → calm). Interactive command line at the bottom—type "help" and explore.
A full newspaper layout. Fraktur masthead, multi-column justified text with drop caps, pull quotes, a sidebar about the Dangling String, and a "Design Crimes Blotter" for anti-patterns.
One slider. Drag left for anxious software (popups, badges, streaks, cookie banners pile up on a phone). Drag right and it all melts away to a single calm line. The page IS the demo.
Real apps placed on an anxious-to-calm gradient. Duolingo, LinkedIn, Slack in the anxious zone. Things 3, iA Writer, Apple Weather in the calm zone. Mini UI recreations for each. Linear in the middle.
"What if Duolingo was calm? What if LinkedIn was calm? What if Slack was calm?" Side-by-side phone mockups showing the real app today vs. a calm redesign. The most provocative and shareable.
Take 10 cranked to 11. Clippy haunts the page. Notification toasts slide in every 6 seconds. Duolingo's countdown timer ticks in real time. Slack's unread counts climb before your eyes. A Mac OS 8.1 VM runs in an iframe. Toggle each app between anxious and calm. The page IS anxious software.
A table grading real apps against the 6 calm principles. Green/yellow/red dots. Click any row to expand the detailed breakdown. Things 3 and Apple Weather ace it. Duolingo and LinkedIn don't.
Forget apps. Car dashboards, smart thermostats, self-checkout kiosks, airplane seatbacks, ATMs, elevator panels. Six everyday interfaces shown anxious vs. calm. The examples-focused take.
Five apps write the apology they owe you. Duolingo confesses about guilt. LinkedIn admits its notifications are meaningless. Instagram mourns the photo app it used to be. MyFitnessPal realizes it might be bad for you.
iTunes, Skype, Evernote, Google Search. Year-by-year timelines showing how each started simple and became anxious. Recreated interfaces at each stage. The bloat creep visualized.
A psychological experiment. Start reading a calm article. After 25 seconds, the page attacks: cookie banners, notification popups, newsletter modals, autoplay video, page shakes. How long before you hit "Make it stop"?