whatchamacallit
/ˈwʌtʃ·ə·mə·kə·lɪt/ noun
- The UI effect you can picture but can’t name, so you ask the AI for “the blurry glass thing” and get something close but wrong.
- This site: a hundred-odd named web design patterns, each with a live demo, the words designers and AI models know it by, and a prompt you can copy.
Try describing it badly:
Namethe precise term
Mechanismhow it’s built
Parameterssizes, timing, easing
Constraintsdeps, a11y, perf
“Add a progressive blur to the bottom of the feed using stacked backdrop-filter layers with gradient masks, ramping 0 → 16px over 96px. No JS, no libraries.”
No term matches “”.
Try describing what it does instead of how it looks: slides, follows the cursor, fades in, sticks. Or search the 1,100+ terms on vocab.design.
Other references
This site covers the visual and motion vocabulary that’s hardest to put into words. These cover more ground, and several were the inspiration for it.
- vocab.design
- The most complete one: 1,124 design and UI terms with live demos, aliases and cross-references. It publishes llms-full.txt, so you can hand the whole dictionary to an agent. Entries here link to it where a matching term exists.
- UI Component Glossary
- Canonical names and synonyms for the core components (inputs, overlays, navigation), built specifically as a reference for AI-assisted development.
- The Component Gallery
- 60 components across 95 design systems. Useful for seeing what Polaris, Material or Carbon each call the same thing.
- NN/g UI Elements Glossary
- Short, authoritative definitions of standard interface elements from Nielsen Norman Group.
- animation-vocabulary skill
- Emil Kowalski’s reverse-lookup agent skill: describe a motion vaguely, get the exact term. Install it into your coding agent with
npx skills add https://github.com/emilkowalski/skills --skill animation-vocabulary. - Aceternity UI and Magic UI
- Effect-heavy React component libraries. Their component names (Border Beam, Spotlight, Marquee, Bento Grid) have become shorthand that AI coding tools recognize, so naming one is often the fastest prompt.
- Swiper demos
- The de facto list of carousel effect names: fade, cube, coverflow, flip, cards, creative, plus layout options like slides-per-view, centered and free mode.
- Codrops
- Fifteen years of creative-coding demos with write-ups. Good when you need the name of an effect that’s too unusual for a component library.