Artifacts of the Small Web
patternsof.design
A Website by Nick Trombleymaya.land
an old-school blogroll, now with banners 😎
Every element is an html.
A Website by Katherine Yanghome sweet homepage
A Website by Amy Wibowoa comic about growing up online
Good Things
A Website by Melanie Richards155-217-155
A Website by Nick Trombleye-worm.club
A Website by Zach ShermanI’m building a custom pleroma client so that my friends and I can have a cute, self-hosted social network to post about politics and art. Besides being much more visually interesting than our facebook messenger groupchat, e-worm also attempts to solve design problems around conversational, collaborative thinking. The biggest of these problems is the inherent ephemerality of our groupchat— it doesn’t really succeed as a collaborative thinking space because it has no long-term memory. When messages are constantly buried under new ones, it places the burden on us to remember previous conversations. So the ultimate design goal for e-worm is to create a self-archiving conversational interface that preserves thought and helps us keep thinking new things rather than going in intellectual circles.
drawing.garden
A Website by Ben MorenGardening, but with emojis and less time.
Marginalia Search
A WebsiteI want to show you that that Internet you used to go exploring is still very much there. There are still tons of small personal websites, and a wealth of long form text from both the past and the present.
So it's a search engine. It's perhaps not the greatest at finding what you already knew was there, instead it is designed to help you find some things you didn't even know you were looking for.
emojraw.glitch.me (draw!)
A Website by Shannon Linminimator.app
An ApplicationMinimator is a minimalist graphical editor.
All drawings are made of lines in a grid based canvas. The lines are limited to vertical and horizontal lines, and quarter circles.
Looseleaf
A Websitepicnic.lectoro.me
A Website by Renan Le CaroCreate a text document, share the link and edit it with friends.
Can I include?
A WebsiteThis site helps you understand which tag you can include in another using the WHATWG HTML specification.
How I experience the web today
A WebsiteLoveFrom,
A WebsiteLoveFrom,
is a creative
collective.press.stripe.com
A WebsiteStripe partners with millions of the world’s most innovative businesses. These businesses are the result of many different inputs. Perhaps the most important ingredient is “ideas.”
Stripe Press highlights ideas that we think can be broadly useful. Some books contain entirely new material, some are collections of existing work reimagined, and others are republications of previous works that have remained relevant over time or have renewed relevance today.
Make Frontend Shit Again
A Website by Sara VieiraWe used to make websites because it was fun but at some point, we lost the way.
We need to make dumb shit!
Make useless stuff;
make the web fun again!Things that don't scale
An Article by Benedict EvansMaybe the internet is due for a wave of things that don’t scale at all. In that light, I’ve been fascinated by ‘Morioka Shoten’ in Tokyo - a bookshop that sells only one book at a time. This is retail as anti-logistics - as a reaction against the firehose, and the infinite replication of Amazon. Before the internet that would only work in a very dense city, but, again, the internet is the densest city on earth, so how far do we scale the unscalable?
AJDVIV
A WebsiteSeriesHeat
A Website by Jim VallandinghamSearch for a TV Series to see a heatmap of average IMDb ratings for each episode.
Kicks Condor: barnsworthburning
An Article by Kicks CondorDirectories aren’t surging. There isn’t this nascent directory movement fomenting - ready to take on the world. Directories aren’t trending.
But there is a certainly really sweet little directory community now. From the Marijn-inspired stuff listed in Directory Uprising to the link-sharing ‘yesterweb’ collected around sadgrl.online - or the originals at Indieseek and i.webthings.
Barnsworthburning (by Nick Trombley) is a very formidable addition to this community - a clean, multilayered design and an innovative bidirectional index.
So many little design helper sites!
An Article by Chris CoyierI’m sure y’all find these things just as useful as I do. They don’t make us lazy, they make us efficient. I know how to make a pattern. I know how to draw a curve with a Pen Tool. I know how to convert SVG into JSX. But using a dedicated tool makes me faster and better at it. And sometimes I don’t know how to do those things, but that doesn’t mean I can’t take advantage. Fake it ’til you make it, right?
Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours
A Website by Nicholas RougeuxA recreation of the original 1821 color guidebook with new cross references, photographic examples, and posters designed by Nicholas Rougeux.
The Whimsical Web
A Website by Max BöckA curated list of sites with an extra bit of fun.
Funcooker
A WebsiteUser Inyerface
A WebsiteA worst-practice UI experiment.
SEA — SEASONS
A Website by Melanie RichardsWith the many distractions life has to offer, it is all too easy to let the seasons slip by and wonder where an entire year has gone. This site is an effort to observe the seasons with intentionality. Each season documents ways to observe the moment, pulling often from pagan traditions.
Lizzo's Juice Shop
A WebsiteThis page is a truly naked, brutalist html quine
An Article by Leon BambrickI decided to make a truly naked, brutalist html page, that is itself a quine. And this page is it.
Viewing the source of this page should reveal a page identical to the page you are now seeing. Nothing is hidden. It's a true "What you see is what you get."
littlebigdetails
A Blog by Floris DekkerLittle Big Details is a curated collection of the finer details of design.
As Charles & Ray Eames put it:
“The details are not the details; they make the product.”
This is intended to be a source of inspiration.
Created and curated by Floris Dekker. Alumni: Andrew McCarthy.
Color Controversy
A Website by Leo RobinovitchSo some friends and I were talking about colors one day and how we all see colors a bit differently and how that's neat.
But is there a color that is interpreted differently THE MOST? Is there a most controversial color? Well, (if I contrive an ongoing survey and collect data about it), the answer is yes, of course!
this vs. that
A Website by Phuoc NguyenIf we were allowed to visit
A Poetry CollectionIf We Were Allowed To Visit is an anthology of poems by Gemma Mahadeo rendered by Ian MacLarty.
As you move through the game's environment, the poems are rearranged into the shapes of the objects they're about, each frame becoming a new generative poem.
When all of my friends are on at once
A Website by Laurel SchwulstMemories of being online
tixy.land
A Websitesin(t * x) * cos(t * y)
Creative code golfing.
tree.fm
A WebsiteTune Into Forests From Around The World. Escape, Relax & Preserve.
Games For Crows: Feels
A GameA Library Demand List
A Website by Robin SloanThis visualization takes the current New York Times Best Sellers list for combined print and e-book fiction and scales each title according to the demand for its e-book edition at a collection of U.S. public libraries, selected for their size and geographic diversity.
The small web is beautiful
An Essay by Ben HoytI believe that small websites are compelling aesthetically, but are also important to help us resist selling our souls to large tech companies. In this essay I present a vision for the “small web” as well as the small software and architectures that power it.
Telescopic Text
A Websitetelescopictext.org is an experimental tool for creating expanding texts. It is based on telescopictext.com.
sodelightful.com
A Website by Christina TranI'm Christina Tran. If you want to trace the trails I've made in the world through the intermittent marks left on the interwebs, below is a map of my becoming in no particular order. But I also hope we get the chance to share a meal, explore nature, experience art, and/or create something together sometime. Because we are all multi-faceted, multi-dimensional beings who can't be TL;DR'd.
Simon Collison's timeline
A Website by Simon CollisonI’ve shaped this timeline over five months. It might look simple, but it most definitely was not. I liken it to chipping away at a block of marble, or the slow process of evolving a painting, or constructing a poem; endless edits, questions, doubling back, doubts. It was so good to have something meaty to get stuck into, but sometimes it was awful, and many times I considered throwing it away. Overall it was challenging, fun, and worth the effort.
Nested
A WebsiteI have a secret for you
A strange universe-expanding game that's been described as "whoah dude".
Explore procedural galaxies, land on unknown planets, read the thoughts of every living thing, rummage through people's pockets, and more!
...and by islands I mean paragraphs
A Website by J.R. CarpenterIslands are possible only in literature. Topical islands are in a time without History. They are paragraphs. They are not part of the central body of the text. Isloated writing is always a testimonial. The castaway embodies the contradiction of beieng a speaker without a society.
HTML Elements Memory Test
A WebsiteMy first attempt was 54. Not even half!
How many HTML elements can you remember?
aboutfeeds.com
A Website by Matt WebbUse feeds to subscribe to websites and get the latest content in one place.
Feeds put you in control. It’s like subscribing to a podcast, or following a company on Facebook. You don’t need to pay or hand over your email address. And you get the latest content without having to visit lots of sites, and without cluttering up your inbox. Had enough? Unsubscribe from the feed.
You just need a special app called a newsreader.
This site explains how to get started.
The life and death of an internet onion
In her piece "A drop of love in the cloud" (2018), artist Fei Liu writes about the like/heart button as a flattening affordance of giving affirmation and love. The text-editor provides a much more expressive input.
But even people who can't communicate well because of language barriers can express love through actions, like cooking food. Can we create other "love inputs" that might allow us to "reach across the chasm of a seamless signal"?
What is expressing "real" love or affirmation about? Is it about effort, thoughtfulness, generosity, something else? What might a thoughtful or generous interface feel or behave like?
Taste for Makers
If there is such a thing as beauty, we need to be able to recognize it. We need good taste to make good things. Instead of treating beauty as an airy abstraction, to be either blathered about or avoided depending on how one feels about airy abstractions, let's try considering it as a practical question: how do you make good stuff?
You feel this when you start to design things
Saying that taste is just personal preference is a good way to prevent disputes. The trouble is, it's not true. You feel this when you start to design things.
As in any job, as you continue to design things, you'll get better at it. Your tastes will change. And, like anyone who gets better at their job, you'll know you're getting better. If so, your old tastes were not merely different, but worse. Poof goes the axiom that taste can't be wrong.
Good design is simple
Good design is simple. You hear this from math to painting. In math it means that a shorter proof tends to be a better one. Where axioms are concerned, especially, less is more. It means much the same thing in programming. For architects and designers it means that beauty should depend on a few carefully chosen structural elements rather than a profusion of superficial ornament. Similarly, in painting, a still life of a few carefully observed and solidly modeled objects will tend to be more interesting than a stretch of flashy but mindlessly repetitive painting of, say, a lace collar. In writing it means: say what you mean and say it briefly.
When you're forced to be simple, you're forced to face the real problem. When you can't deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance.
Good design is timeless
Good design is timeless. Aiming at timelessness is a way to make yourself find the best answer: if you can imagine someone surpassing you, you should do it yourself. Some of the greatest masters did this so well that they left little room for those who came after. Every engraver since Durer has had to live in his shadow.
Aiming at timelessness is also a way to evade the grip of fashion. Fashions almost by definition change with time, so if you can make something that will still look good far into the future, then its appeal must derive more from merit and less from fashion.
Good design is often slightly funny
Good design is often slightly funny. This one may not always be true. But Durer's engravings and Saarinen's womb chair and the Pantheon and the original Porsche 911 all seem to me slightly funny. Godel's incompleteness theorem seems like a practical joke.
I think it's because humor is related to strength. To have a sense of humor is to be strong: to keep one's sense of humor is to shrug off misfortunes, and to lose one's sense of humor is to be wounded by them.
Good design is hard, but looks easy
Good design is hard.
— but —
Good design looks easy.
Good design is redesign
Good design is redesign. It's rare to get things right the first time. Experts expect to throw away some early work. They plan for plans to change.
It helps to have a medium that makes change easy. When oil paint replaced tempera in the fifteenth century, it helped painters to deal with difficult subjects like the human figure because, unlike tempera, oil can be blended and overpainted.
Good design can copy
Good design can copy. Attitudes to copying often make a round trip. A novice imitates without knowing it; next he tries consciously to be original; finally, he decides it's more important to be right than original.
I think the greatest masters go on to achieve a kind of selflessness. They just want to get the right answer, and if part of the right answer has already been discovered by someone else, that's no reason not to use it. They're confident enough to take from anyone without feeling that their own vision will be lost in the process.
I could do better than that
As a practical matter, I think it's easier to see ugliness than to imagine beauty. Most of the people who've made beautiful things seem to have done it by fixing something that they thought ugly. Great work usually seems to happen because someone sees something and thinks, I could do better than that.