when I was little, I’d ballpark around 10 years old, my aunt helped me make a website. i don’t remember what site or domain we used, just that I had to create my first email address ever to sign up for it, which felt exciting. the site itself was simple, all done up in blue, my favorite color back then, with some links to my own favorite websites: dressupgames.com, ebaumsworld, gaiaonline, and the like. I played around on it for that whole day, then promptly forgot about it, as children are wont to do.
but as you can see, the memory itself has stuck with me all these years later. that sense of exploration and wonder was so impactful, and used to be quite commonplace on the internet—every site I visited was like discovering a new landmark, something created by someone else for me to trawl through. I could see the human hand on every page, the alignment of the text or the pixels of the carefully chosen images like feeling the stitching of a book cover and discovering underlined print within. I wanted so badly to know how to make something like that—something of my own that I could share with others, and perhaps create that sense of wonder within them as well. It was a daunting idea, but I couldn’t get it out of my head.
not as a kid, at least. as I grew up and the internet started to become what it is, that wonder began to diminish. sites lost their clunky personalization in favor of streamlined, homogenized layouts, the backends of each page locked out of our reach. we could customize the text in our bios and choose which photos we posted, sure, but it all had to be done within the constraints of clean white backgrounds and a predetermined chronological layout. the only exploration afforded to us was from timeline to profile then back to timeline again.
as websites began to cater to advertisers rather than users, they also began to cater to the mobile experience rather than the desktop experience. we became acclimated to accessing the internet from our phones, devices that had also removed most if not all of our control in terms of internal access and customization—our ownership. the experience itself was designed to not be experienced—the internet was fast and sleek now, designed to catch your eye lightning-fast and predict which reactions it could play off of for your continued engagement. you didn’t explore it—you were led around, seeing what you were meant to see while all other embellishment sloughed off over time.
using the internet nowadays is no longer a treat. it’s a ubiquity, and with the help of corporate greed, contempt has grown fast.
that’s why I want my own space. I want something I can create not for money, not to further my career, not to develop a marketable skill, but purely for the love of the game. I want my own space that I can do up however I want—I don’t want to paint it beige and tastefully arrange a plant and a geometric ikea couch, I want to cram all of my dusty, beloved knick-knacks wherever they’ll fit, and wherever I can stare at them warmly. I want to beat back all the ironic screeches of “graphic design is my passion!!!1!” that my own graphic design degree threatens to lob at me, to stop viewing my creations through the hypothetical eyes of some critical audience fed to bursting with the notion that the web should be easy, consumable, unobtrusive. I want #ff0000 red and times new roman, clunky repeating backgrounds, and the digital dirt under my nails as I build my very own space from the ground up.
I just want to have fun again. thanks for reading!
