Design Graveyard • SquaredPancake

Iteration is a seemingly inescapable part for many things in life (e.g. writing, drawing, ), and building my website is no exception – this page lists the previous designs and ideas I had to...

...let other's see that it doesn't take much to stumble together their own website
...give other's ideas for how to design and structure their own website
...give my thoughts on certain design patterns

Scrapped Design Decisions

Also see my currently employed design decisions in the site's current design!

Hovercards being underlined

Breadcrumbs

On previous iterations of this site's design, I used breadcrumbs (Something that tells you where you're nested on the page. For example, right now you're inside the Design Graveyard page, which is part of the About this Website page, which is also part of the Meta page. So, the breadcrumb widget would display something like "Meta >> About this Website! >> Design Graveyard").

The primary reason I removed it was because it cluttered up the navigation UI without really adding anything of value (the existing navigation element of just having four links to the four big sections and then quickly clicking through to the page you want is fine enough for me) whilst redesigning the header part of every page. The primary reason why I even added it in the first place was because freckleskies' site used it as well and thought that it might be a neat and useful addition.

Aside: I read an article called "Strong Opinions on URL Design" once and it said that good URLs can also serve as breadcrumbs, which is a connection I havent drawn before
Back when I was still unsure if I should truly remove the breadcrumbs element, I had the idea of making it only visible when hovering over the navigation section; the idea being to hide visual clutter you don't need (this idea was inspired by the Focus something theme on Obsidian that also hides most UI elements until you hover over them, leading to a cleaner UI).
- As there is no such thing as "hovering over something" on mobile, it would've always been visible on it.

2026-04-26: Through pure happenstance, I accidentally discovered that the supertitle for pages (e.g. the "Notes on..." above the "Threatmixer" in my "Notes on Threatmixer" page, which I purely implemented for style and flow at first) is actually very well suited to also provide a link back to the upper section, essentially replacing the breadcrumbs with something more subtle and not out-of-place! Neat!