Leo

Redesigning this website over the weekend gave me a curious feeling. It was a deeply cozy one, as if my work sits on a continuum of all the other websites and books every made. As if my work is a link in a long chain through time. You’ll likely spot the inspiration right away: this redesign took an LLM copyright approach to Tschichold’s work and his rather beautiful designs for Penguin Books that are still iconic almost a century later. There’s other inspirations in here, too. Little details, like the code blocks from <a href="https://chsmc.org/">Chase McCoy’s website</a> which give an air of confidence to an otherwise empty, sad little box of code. Or you can peek under the hood into the code itself and find snippets like this one, <a href="https://piccalil.li/blog/creating-a-full-bleed-css-utility/">the full-bleed CSS utility</a> by Andy Bell: <pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css">.full-bleed { width: 100vw; margin-left: calc(50% - 50vw); }</code></pre> However, the redesign of this website has always been inspired by a new font release and this time <a href="https://frerejones.com/families/edgar">Edgar</a> was the one that caught my eye. It’s stately and elegant and sick. Tobias Frere-Jones and Nina Stössinger made a system that’s clearly bookish yet without feeling prudish or uptight about it. But reading <a href="https://frerejones.com/blog/designing-edgar">Edgar’s design notes</a> you can follow my inspiration back and connect the dots to other sources of inspiration, too: <blockquote> “Looking at Caslon again, I realized this wasn’t just some historical artifact. There was something deeper — something still very present and alive,” says Frere-Jones, who felt “an unexpectedly strong reaction” as he pored over the letterforms more intensely. “It was a kind of strange resonance, like when you play a certain note on a speaker and the windows rattle.” </blockquote> That’s what inspiration is: finding an old thing and watching it move once again, discovering something else in there that you can remix. Or perhaps even rescue. At <a href="https://www.famsf.org/exhibitions/art-of-manga">the Art of Manga exhibition</a> at the de Young Museum last week I could hear that same hum. With my nose smushed against the glass, zooming in as far as I could to the beautiful sketches and drawings, I could see how all this work was connected: thousands upon thousands of hours. And all of it stacked on top of more work that I couldn’t see underneath with references and inspirations looted from somewhere else then tweaked and applied in strange new ways. Speaking of which, I’ve been reading William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer lately and it feels as if I’ve found some holy text, the source of truth for all modern sci-fi. Going in I knew the book was an inspiration to dozens of books and videogames and movies but I hadn’t quite grasped the full extent of it: <blockquote> He’d operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a by-product of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix. </blockquote> I gasped as I discovered how throwaway lines or concepts that the novel introduces for a gentle dose of color and world-building have inspired enormous universes of fresh new stories: Night City, decks, eddies, “jacking in”, chrome, corpos, and the goddamn matrix just to name a few. This was how I felt redesigning my website this time round as there was just so much inspiration that it’s become overwhelming. I want to steal basically everything from <a href="https://anhvn.com/">anh’s new homepage</a> or bottle up the typographic confidence of <a href="https://nazhamid.com/">Naz’s website</a>. I want to distill the warm welcome of <a href="https://realdougwilson.com/">Doug’s</a> and soak up all the the focus and sturdiness of <a href="https://printingfilms.com/">Printing Films</a> and then for good measure package up the ordered curiosity of <a href="https://aworkinglibrary.com/">Mandy’s website</a>. And, of course, I want to put as much effort and energy into a thing as Lucas Pope put into <a href="https://youtu.be/90vqCKEEj3s?si=Sy-aoQiKiJMfRXHY">modeling his beautiful boat</a>. For now this redesign will do. It’s still messy, unfinished in places. Dark mode needs a lot of work. Mobile styles look clunky, too. I’ll continue to polish the infinite-scrolling blog posts (or I’ll get sick of them in a week and quietly cut them). I might re-add an about page or more information about me since that feels a little stark and threadbare today. That stuff is always tricky to figure out though. But this redesign was a good reminder that I’m always working amongst smart, inquisitive folks and all of them are taking inspiration from unlikely sources and adding their own thing to the mix. There is an abundance of inspiration out there—across media and genre and quirky publishing formats—and I just have to keep my eyes open to see it.