Jeremy Thomas, a designer and developer, makes short web design tutorials and small projects, and created the Bulma CSS framework.
HN commenters repeatedly recommend Web Design in 4 Minutes as a way to learn simple, elegant HTML and CSS, calling it the Mona Lisa of HN.
Um, what? I've been building websites since the late 90s and I absolutely disagree that there were only "minor" additions to HTML and CSS. Sure, the basic structure of HTML is unchanged, but you can't look at it without looking at CSS, as HTML just describes what to display, but now how (well there is a standard way of displaying HTML without any styling but it's not very appealing).
The progress that CSS(+HTML) has made in the last 20 years is incredible: I still remember using ugly DIV tricks to get the luxury of rounded corners and shadows, which work out of the box in modern CSS. Or how hard it was to align content, which is still not super trivial but so much easier with things like flexbox and CSS grid layouts (which before also required ugly hacks like floating DIVs and clearing techniques).
I think it has also never been easier to self-publish and self-host HTML websites, and no one forces you to use JS or frontend frameworks. We e.g. build all our professional websites using static HTML and we host them ourselves. For non-programmers there are tons of great tools available to visually design webpages as well.
JS is also fantastic, and frameworks like React make it so much easier to write clean, good-looking web apps. I still remember the tangle of code that most websites were made of in the early 2000s, with jQuery and a dozen other frameworks mixed together and poorly bundled. Today we have a great compiler chain to which you can feed JS, (S)CSS, YAML, JSON,…
Maybe "redesign" is too strong of the word - we're not advocating complete redesign (I'm one of the guys who collected these examples because I love HN), but HN could certainly use some improvements. Even a post "Why HN doesn't need a redesign" http://jgthms.com/why-hn-doesnt-need-a-redesign.html features a point that "the HN Wishlist appeared on HN's front page. It unsurprisingly spawned some discussion about HN's design. The 3rd most upvoted wish is Refresh the visual design."
Redesigns are great thought exercises, each of these has something interesting, that can be taken away as an inspiration if HN will start looking to change (especially some repeating UI elements).
Btw the share amount of redesigns for HN online and comments on them clearly show that people are at least very interested in this subject. And it may prove the point that HN doesn't need a redesign, since so many designers see HN redesign as a major challenge to test their skill. Anyways, I enjoyed compiling this list :)
My friend swears by Wikiwand, but I hate how it changes all links to its own domain. (It really should have been a browser extension instead of its own website that's merely a stylesheet) It also overoptimizes for the reader: minimizing the edit tab, hiding the talk page, hiding the history tab, over-enlarging images, and making disambiguation hatnotes nearly invisible. I do like how it has article preview popups on hover, though Wikipedia has had that feature in beta for a while. This blog post sums up the objection to redesigns well: http://jgthms.com/wikipedia-redesign.html
Related/I like this: https://jgthms.com/web-design-in-4-minutes/
(IMO someone ought to write, if one doesn't already exist, an interactive tool that suggests recommended styling for your site one by one, and you can accept or reject each of them, then save the CSS file when you're done.)
See also (it works fine in Firefox but the fonts don't seem to change in Chrome and I don't know why): https://mbarkhau.keybase.pub/readable-text/index.html
While clever, there's a few problems with the navigation on this site.
1. The back button doesn't undo the changes. Abstractly, clicking on a link performs some navigation which the back button is supposed to reverse. That doesn't work here.
2. Fragment links don't work. http://jgthms.com/web-design-in-4-minutes/#centering should take me to the 3rd step. Instead it just dumps me on the first step.
https://css-tricks.com/box-sizing/
https://blog.teamtreehouse.com/box-sizing-secret-simple-css-layouts
https://quirksmode.org/css/user-interface/boxsizing.html
https://www.jefftk.com/p/the-revenge-of-the-ie-box-model
https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/12351
https://jgthms.com/minireset.css/
https://github.com/sindresorhus/modern-normalize
https://semantic-ui.com/globals/reset.html