

Show HN: Discreet Twitter buttons - tholman
http://tholman.com/discreet-twitter-ui/

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mipapage
Interesting; I think a couple of those may break their logo user guidelines.

While they are fun, I have a feeling that engagement or clickthru of the
element they uncover may be higher without the layer of complexity on top of
them.

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maxmcd
That's certainly true, and something I've witnessed in the past when implement
hover-to-reveal social buttons. I feel like these are great for personal sites
or small projects where you might be able to sacrifice a little on the
conversion side in exchange for some added visual aesthetic.

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vineet
My problem with such buttons is actually something slightly different: I often
notice that on webpages that it looks like the page is interesting and I want
to follow similar work, but I don't know how much noise is on the person's
twitter account (as opposed to the person's projects). ...I would like to see
the most recent tweets show up when I hover over the button.

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zmitri
Although I wouldn't put these on a consumer site, I might throw it on the
personal one. These are absolutely beautiful. Great work tholman.

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eli
They look really slick, but I have to say I'm not a big fan of things that
jump around when my cursor happens to move over them.

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JoshTriplett
Interesting, but it seems to show up as a Unicode missing character of E000
rather than whatever it intended to show up as.

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tholman
Sorry about that, had some CORS problems with the fonts... should be fixed :)

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JoshTriplett
What's the advantage of a font over an image here?

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tholman
Thats a very good point, using a font had the advantage of malleability when
building them (colors, size etc) ... but now that they're finalized, I should
shift them over to images.

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shyn3
Awesome work.

Would this be against the new TOS for Twitter where you aren't supposed to
modify the bird?

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ohhmaar
Very simple. Very smooth animations. I like.

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habosa
Wow those are beautiful. Nice work!

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danso
This is a cool effect, but I wonder if it wouldn't be more effective if
instead the reveal had the logo come in _after_ the onhover.

What I mean is that the link is plaintext, something like "Follow me at
@username", which most people recognize as a call to action and a link to
Twitter. Upon hover, the Twitter blue is applied with some animation, maybe
something like the logo flying in. (yes, I know that screams against most
people's personal design aesthetic here, but maybe it will work for some
designers who want to stand out and are clever about it).

The main difference is that the Twitter logo is _too_ discrete. There is
literally no call to action and there's nothing about the Twitter logo that
leads me to think that hovering over it will reveal the call to action. It's
more likely to make me think: "This person works at Twitter!"

* edit: on reflection, I do realize that those Twitter icons, especially when used in conjunction with other social icons, are recognized as the "These are the social accounts", especially when they are in the footer. But I guess you'd have to do something different for the other social buttons?

If it's just one Twitter logo and no other social-button context, I still
think that the call-to-action is too subtle.

