A Gallery Driving Mobile-First Web Design

loadmo.re is a gallery of distinctive smartphone websites designed to promote mobile-first thinking. It addresses the gap between today’s phone-centric usage and designers’ desktop-centric workflows. By curating strong mobile examples, it aims to inspire better use of mobile affordances and foster industry conversation.

Key Points

• Most digital interactions have shifted from desktop to smartphones, yet design practice remains desktop-oriented.
• Designers often research and reference desktop sites, reinforcing outdated assumptions and workflows.
• loadmo.re curates notable smartphone websites as a source of inspiration and reference.
• The goal is to encourage designers to fully exploit the phone’s unique interface and functionalities.
• The platform aims to catalyze conversation and cultural change around mobile-first design.

Sentiment

The community is broadly positive about the concept of curating creative, unconventional web design, with genuine nostalgia for the expressive early web. However, enthusiasm is significantly tempered by concerns about accessibility and usability. The most engaged debate threads center on the gallery site's own UX failures rather than the showcased designs, revealing that Hacker News values functional design even when appreciating artistic experimentation.

In Agreement

• This represents the 'conventional web I want' — a return to the groovy, creative internet before everything became homogenized templates and boring carousels
• Collecting experimental web design examples in one curated place serves a valuable purpose for designers seeking inspiration beyond standard Wordpress and Squarespace layouts
• We can have both accessible informational sites and inspiring experimental sites — markup separated from presentation allows each to serve its purpose
• The showcased sites contain many 'diamonds in the rough' with genuine experiments in interaction design worth borrowing from, even if not all succeed

Opposed

• Most showcased examples are terrible for accessibility and frustrating when trying to find specific information — novelty alone does not make good design
• This echoes the Flash era where visually exciting sites had poor usability, and brands like Girbaud eventually abandoned creative layouts for conventional e-commerce because customers couldn't actually use them
• The gallery itself has ironic usability problems: infinite scroll blocks the footer, links transform into two-click interactions, and the cookie banner won't let users disable Google Analytics
• UX matters even for art — a gallery that gets in the way of viewing its own exhibits undermines the showcased work, making criticism of interaction patterns valid rather than nitpicky