Finding design inspiration for Minki
A lot of Minki's design is inspired by things I saw on some of my favorite sites. I thought it would be interesting to compile the original vs how it ended up featuring in the end product!
Progress dock - Stripe Press
Stripe Press's navigation inspired my dock for navigating through a card's pages, as well as Apple's liquid glass. I have a lens layer that redraws the dot background at 1.42×, so the dots inside the panel are visibly bigger than the ones outside it, the way they would be under real glass. It's pretty subtle but I really like the effect.
CD - Design Spells
This came from Design Spells, one of my favorite websites for UI inspiration. I stumbled on this design for colorful discs that show the user's reflection. In Minki, the discs show in the corner of your card and it plays a Spotify playlist.
I also added functionality to write on it in marker like an actual burned CD. You can spin the disc while you're drawing, so the text curves the way it does when you're writing round the edge of a real one:
Loading screen - Figma
I liked Figma's clean loading screen and created something similar, with a staggered effect as the page loads. Each dot of the mark is delayed by its position in the logo, so it looks like the whole thing is being drawn.
Vinyl record - Pinterest
PinterestI saw this pretty looking vinyl record on Pinterest and it inspired me to let people upload voice notes that play as vinyl records. I added several theme styles, but one of them came almost directly from the Pinterest image's colors!
Font - Nothing
Nothing
MinkiMinki's card font is Ndot-47, an open source dot matrix face inspired by Nothing. The original only covers English and a handful of accents (143 glyphs) so I extended it with 243 more to support a lot more languages. It's also the font you're seeing on this site!
Top bar - FigJam
FigJam
MinkiFigJam's layout of its top bar directly inspired Minki's. And it's also where I got the idea of using a dot grid as my background.
Cat <3