Overview
useless random color buttons is a gentle rebellion against the pressure to be productive.
Most of our digital lives are spent clicking with intent — to pay bills, finish tasks, or seek validation. This app offers the opposite: a zero-stakes environment where you click simply to clear the mess.
Colored buttons spawn randomly and pile up on your screen. Your goal is to fight the rising visual chaos, track your stats, or simply acknowledge the futility of the task and give up.
Why Play a Useless Game?
I built this as a code experiment, but I found it works best as a digital palate cleanser.
Visual Mantra: Click. Vanish. Flash. Repeat. This simple loop occupies the restless "fast" part of your brain so the "slow" part can finally relax.
Zero-Stakes Interaction: There are no consequences, no high scores to beat, and no algorithms judging you.
Anti-Productivity: A reminder that not every second needs to be optimized. Sometimes it feels good to make colorful squares disappear just because you can.
Key Features
Controlled Chaos: Buttons pile up in a heap, but the UI remains distinct and clickable.
Gamified Stats: Track your "Button Clicks Per Second" (BCPS) and total buttons cleared.
Highly Configurable: Switch button labels to Hex codes, numbers, or timestamps, and adjust spawn rates to stress-test your browser.
Portable & Offline: Available as a standard PWA or as a single downloadable HTML file (~90KB) that runs offline on any OS.
The Origin Story
I built the original version during the quiet days of the Christmas holiday (Dec 27-29, 2021). It was the perfect escape from the work that usually pays the bills — just a few free days squeezed between family celebrations to tinker with something purely for fun.
The catalyst was Netlify's Dusty Domains challenge, which pledged to donate to charity for every site shipped on a long-neglected domain. The prompt encouraged "completely silly projects," so I built this as a playful "Hello World" exploration into random DOM manipulation.
Technical Details
As with all my projects, I wanted to keep the code as clean and lightweight as possible.
Stack: Vanilla JavaScript (ES6 Modules) & Tailwind CSS.
No Frameworks: No React or Vue overhead.
Open Source: Released under the MIT License.