Some websites are simply too well made to swim past. This box holds the ones that got us — reviewed one at a time, and impossible to buy into.
13 catches 13 beats 8 lures 11 shades
The ones we'd never release.
Playdate is Panic's pocket-sized yellow game console with a hand crank, shipping games in surprise seasonal batches from indie developers. The whole project — hardware, distribution, website — runs on the premise that fun is a legitimate spec.
The Pudding publishes visual essays that argue cultural questions with data — rap vocabularies, laugh tracks, the geometry of jeans pockets. Each story ships as its own bespoke piece of interactive journalism, built by a small studio of journalist-engineers.
Klim is Kris Sowersby's type foundry in Wellington, New Zealand, behind faces like Söhne, Signifier and Founders Grotesk. Alongside the catalogue it publishes some of the most rigorous writing on type design anywhere on the web.
Straight off the line, newest first.
Playdate is Panic's pocket-sized yellow game console with a hand crank, shipping games in surprise seasonal batches from indie developers. The whole project — hardware, distribution, website — runs on the premise that fun is a legitimate spec.
Superlist is the task manager built by the founders of Wunderlist after Microsoft absorbed their first one — tasks, notes and team plans in a single app. The pitch leans hard on finish: a to-do list you'd actually enjoy looking at.
Raycast is the launcher that swallowed a whole category of utilities — window management, clipboard history, AI chat — behind one keystroke, now on Windows as well as the Mac where it began. Its site set the tone for a wave of dark, keyboard-flavored product pages.
Rivian builds electric trucks and SUVs pitched at people who drive toward dirt on purpose, plus the delivery vans it developed for Amazon. Its site sells the machines with poster-scale type and almost no spec-sheet noise.
Mercury provides banking and finance software to startups, and has spent years arguing that financial software deserves real design attention. Much of the industry's current taste in fintech interfaces traces back to this company's output.
The Pudding publishes visual essays that argue cultural questions with data — rap vocabularies, laugh tracks, the geometry of jeans pockets. Each story ships as its own bespoke piece of interactive journalism, built by a small studio of journalist-engineers.
Neal.fun is Neal Agarwal's one-person arcade of interactive toys — scroll the depths of the ocean, spend Bill Gates' fortune, survive password purgatory. Several of its games rank among the most-shared pages on the modern web.
Oatly is the Swedish oat drink company whose self-mocking packaging voice — printed disclaimers, arguments with itself, jokes about its own marketing — became the product's real moat. The website extends the carton onto the internet.
Every catch to date, newest at the top.
Playdate is Panic's pocket-sized yellow game console with a hand crank, shipping games in surprise seasonal batches from indie developers. The whole project — hardware, distribution, website — runs on the premise that fun is a legitimate spec.
Superlist is the task manager built by the founders of Wunderlist after Microsoft absorbed their first one — tasks, notes and team plans in a single app. The pitch leans hard on finish: a to-do list you'd actually enjoy looking at.
Raycast is the launcher that swallowed a whole category of utilities — window management, clipboard history, AI chat — behind one keystroke, now on Windows as well as the Mac where it began. Its site set the tone for a wave of dark, keyboard-flavored product pages.
Rivian builds electric trucks and SUVs pitched at people who drive toward dirt on purpose, plus the delivery vans it developed for Amazon. Its site sells the machines with poster-scale type and almost no spec-sheet noise.
Mercury provides banking and finance software to startups, and has spent years arguing that financial software deserves real design attention. Much of the industry's current taste in fintech interfaces traces back to this company's output.
The Pudding publishes visual essays that argue cultural questions with data — rap vocabularies, laugh tracks, the geometry of jeans pockets. Each story ships as its own bespoke piece of interactive journalism, built by a small studio of journalist-engineers.
Neal.fun is Neal Agarwal's one-person arcade of interactive toys — scroll the depths of the ocean, spend Bill Gates' fortune, survive password purgatory. Several of its games rank among the most-shared pages on the modern web.
Oatly is the Swedish oat drink company whose self-mocking packaging voice — printed disclaimers, arguments with itself, jokes about its own marketing — became the product's real moat. The website extends the carton onto the internet.
Headspace turned guided meditation into a mainstream subscription app, with mental-health coaching and sleep content folded in since. Its round-headed characters and sunrise palette made calm itself into a recognizable visual brand.
Atlas Obscura catalogues the world's overlooked wonders — sunken churches, absurd museums, parks built to be misunderstood — in a largely reader-contributed atlas grown since 2009 into tens of thousands of places. Trips to many of them are what fund the archive.
Klim is Kris Sowersby's type foundry in Wellington, New Zealand, behind faces like Söhne, Signifier and Founders Grotesk. Alongside the catalogue it publishes some of the most rigorous writing on type design anywhere on the web.
Monocle is Tyler Brûlé's magazine of global affairs, business and soft power, published on paper first since 2007 with a radio station on the side. Its website behaves like a broadsheet that happens to load in a browser.
The Rijksmuseum is the Netherlands' national museum of art and history, home of The Night Watch and The Milkmaid. It was an early mover in giving away ultra-high-resolution scans of its own masterpieces for anyone to download and reuse.
End of the box. It only grows one review at a time. Cast your site
