People collect some weird things. Napkins, banana labels, celebrity hair…. Some people collect buttons too: most often buttons from clothing, but how about buttons from websites?
A new Google Chrome extension lets you do just that, allowing UI designers with hoarding tendencies to build up a collection of online buttons. It’s not exactly one of the best UI design tools, but it’s surprisingly addictive.
Button Stealer was created by Hamburg-based multidisciplinary designer Anatoly Zenkov, who describes the extension as “fun, useless, and free!” It basically copies a button from every website you visit and saves them to a collection that you can stop to admire whenever you want. The buttons in the collection are active, takings you to the website they came from when clicked.
While Zenkov says the tool is “useless”, it could actually be a handy way to store inspiration from around the web on one very specific aspect of UI design. You can edit your collection to remove the duds and keep the buttons you like. Collected UI buttons might not have any value, but, personally, I find them more interesting than stamps.
For more design news, see the new Mazda logo and the best Olympics logos.
