hi.
The site you’re currently looking at, is built with it, and so does every my project, and it’s called Kantzen UI.
Where did it even come from?
I always loved design, and just the magical feeling of tweaking things until they hit just right, frontend was always very satisfying, because unlike in other branches of programming, your results are instant, and it doesn’t take a senior developer, to look at what you just did and say it’s either decent or terrible, because at the end of the day, even the simplest of users, will instantly mock that your design is annoying, difficult to use, or just straight up gimmicky (guilty)
The issue being, is there’s always some way of it being possibly better, improving upon on it, even having different opinion on the design, the biggest amount of complaints is when you start trying to create something for everyone, that’s as neutral as possible, meaning you dont dare to go into any other direction, you just try to stay in the middle.
The result being, is that your site is just bland, and likely this is where people can complain the most about the design.
I’m very opinionated guy, and I love opinionated designs, with strong directions (Teenage Engineering, Thinkpad, Nothing, Linear, Apple, GNOME, etc..)
But one design philosophy that always tingled my brain in the right spots?
Since my childhood I would always fixate on scenes with those futuristic military UI’s flashing on the screens, random windows on them zooming in/out, with some uncomprehensible data, graphs?
Awesome.
Shame, it was never made into actual real life UI’s, at least I never met anything similar.
Inspiration
One day I was goofing around the internet, and I came upon news about a small military startup called Anduril, exploding out of sudden with their drones and guy with a mullet, but the moment I saw their interfaces I felt as if I experienced God itself..
SOMEONE ACTUALLY DID IT.. Sadly, they did not share their internal UI framework they used, but you know who did?
Another startup that certainly everyone loves, Palantir, with their BlueprintJS!
Which is where, after some numerous tweaks to align it to my liking I came something really close that that Lattice OS look. I started prototyping with it for the project of self hostable IoT Hub alternative (Will be announced soon as open source), and after enough work I came with enough modifications, where it made sense, to write it from scratch, already knowing what I want to achieve.
Finally
That gave birth to Kantzen UI, which slowly but surely makes its way into everything I create. It’s still rough on the edges, but is definitely usable, scales quite nicely on smaller devices, is quite clean (contrast might be quite bad in some scenarios, hope you like bunch of white and black).
If you want to get another taste of place where it’s used, you can check it out in my another project which I will write soon about:
I’m currently working on actually creating a dedicated demo website for KantzenUI, as well as making nice previews for all available components within it, stay tuned!
If you actually read this all, congratulations! And honestly quite nice to hear :)
Cya!