December 14, 2025 update:
Below I mentioned seeing videos of Persona UI, and I have since played a Persona game. I really, really enjoy the UI in Persona 5, but I think something that goes underappreciated relative to flashy animations is snappiness. The Persona 5 UI is, for the most part, very responsive, even while having lots of movement and animation, and they accomplish this by having the interactive elements be interactive long before the animation finishes. Additionally, I think that the animations cancel nicely, and flow together even when they're not played out to completion, which makes rapid movement through the UI feel incredible. At the end of the day, people are interacting with your UI to do something, and responsiveness should not be sacrificed for visuals.
In my humble, uninformed opinion, you should build your UIs for the high-end of usage frequency cases. Imagine a daily user of your software. Their movements through your software are probably automatic to them, and the UI should feel just as automatic. If say, there's a drawer that comes out when you click on something to edit some properties, don't think about the first time or first twenty times that this flow will happen, think about the thousandth. If there's a 0.5s animation for the drawer open, that's going to get tiring real fast. Maybe it showing up instantly without any animation doesn't feel as flashy when you're developing, but you're not developing for the clicked-five-times use case.
I think the main reason I enjoy the Persona UIs is that they feel so active. They almost always involve figures of people moving and striking different poses which I think gives it a greater feeling of motion. It would genuinely be a dream to create a beautiful, responsive UI like the Persona ones.
Original text:
I don't know how to design good websites (maybe that was already obvious to you based on your tastes in web design). I am a huge fan of the plain HTML + minimal CSS look: Nat Friedman websites are goated. But that can't be the pinnacle of good web design.
Even though I'm not really sure what is good, I do know some things that I dislike. I really dislike when websites hijack the scroll and do something funky with it. The most annoying one is websites that add the "content floats up/appears when you scroll down" when it's completely unnecessary. Another big one is horizontal scroll. Another common pattern is when the scrolling is "discrete": either the scroll jumps between sections, or the scroll simply makes more content appear on the current section.
All of these things, in my opinion, are deployed in places where they're unnecessary and don't look good and don't make it easy to traverse the website.
Relatedly, it should be easy for me to find what I'm looking for on your website! I really dislike company websites that don't make it clear what they're doing. This is not a point of "visual" design but I think this is a component of design nonetheless.
I do like very flashy interactive design sometimes. This is not a website, but I've seen clips on Twitter of the menus in one of the Persona games and I thought it was really beautiful. I'm not really sure how to translate that to websites.
I also obviously have some aesthetic biases: I love "old technology" looking things, whether that's simple HTML pages or something like the P*DA from Pokemon Colosseum (admittedly that one doesn't look exceptionally beautiful, but there is a charm to it. Anyways I'm only mentioning it because I saw someone's personal website today that kind of reminded me of it).