I greatly enjoyed this, there's some real gems and creativity in there if you're into minimalistic design. I particularly enjoyed the Norma graphic design studio website [1], which is not only aesthetically appealing to me, but also has some thought provoking content on design aesthetics itself.
Interesting, I like minimalist sites with no need to js and I submitted my personal one because why not, but I also like very well done js/three.js one, the other day I stumbled upon some very nice ones like https://chartogne-taillet.com and another one with a lego world when you scroll down, but can’t find the link.
I love these because it feels like the constraints imposed by size has encouraged folks to be creative. And there's a fair bit of diversity among the sites.
As much as I think that minimal black text on a white background can be quite elegant, there are so many sites that follow this pattern in the original link that they end up eliciting little more than a shrug from me.
The whole concept is severely flawed. They’re mostly just plain text blogs or link fronts to things that are definitely not 512 kb. Many of them link to GitHub projects. Is GitHub a 512 kb no-JS static website? I don’t think so.
Fine to call me cynical on this, I don't think this is a gallery of simple sites in the 'appreciative' sense. There are many, many websites which would fit these criteria listed and none are listed.
Looking through the featured sites, it appears to be a curated list of promotional content under the guise of something else. You can tell because most of them are what digital designers link to from their CVs, to stand out (and ironically they look very similar to each other).
Most of the remaining ones are ads for products, pretty much.
The other main giveaway is the ?ref as you follow the links.
IMO this is a linkfarm without actually interesting content.
As much as I like no-frills pre-Web 2.0 bells and whistles websites like the ones submitted to Wiby, these ain’t it. Moreover, the minimalism these sites have don’t look particularly remarkable- they all have that Medium aesthetic. Or the look of seed stage / stealth startup sites.
Not that the internet should lack creativity and animation, but sometimes it distracts from the goal.