About

There’s many ways to think about a personal website but to explain how I see this place we have to go back to 1987.

In the summer of that year, a proto-internet emerged called HyperCard. (Yes, this is how I greet people at parties). It was designed to help folks write apps—or “stacks” as they called them—and it was way ahead of its time. With HyperCard you could bundle stories and games together, or even learn how to program from scratch. It was a beautiful mess.

I’ve always loved that word though—stacks!—and it’s perfect to describe this website of mine: bundles of disorganized and chaotic gatherings of pure, raw stuff. It’s all so messy! And embarrassing!

Although, if you look closely, there’s a few topics in the stack that keep returning.

First: reading, writing, and publishing—the shape of text on screens. Second: graphic design and web typography that’s all tuned in, with every flourish and detail cared for. Third: figuring out how to organize folks to make punk rock software (if there is such a thing).

I’ll admit I’ve drunk the cyberpunk koolaid of 1995 and 1987 and every year in between where networked computers were seen as an adventure. And so I still believe that websites can be as beautiful or, sometimes, even more beautiful than a handmade book. Just in their own way.

My excitement here might sound unhinged since websites in 2024 often feel like a burden we have to endure. When we boot up a browser and dial in a URL, how often do we brace ourselves for impact? It feels like we’ve collectively given up on the hope of making a new kind of graphic design or a new kind of literature along the way. Websites are boring now. The frontier has been seized. We’re too late.

I believe though that we haven’t figured out everything that a website can be just yet. I reckon we haven’t figured out the web in the same way that great book designers haven’t figured out all the things a book can be yet, 500 hundred years after the invention of movable type.

So everything about my work makes that argument in varying degrees of loudness: websites can and should aspire to be so much more than they are today.

And that’s what my website—my stack—aspires to be, too.

Colophon #

Body text is set in Söhne by Klim Type and I can’t think of anything else to read my words in. The ever-so-lovely headings are set in Irregardless by Ohno which have the perfect amount of charm.

Under the hood, everything is powered by Eleventy which just happens to be my favorite tool for publishing websites.