To be fair, no one asked us this question, but you should. So we decided to answer it because we believe it's important to share our why.
So, the simple answer as to why we designed our website like this is because it's fun and why not? We missed a time where the Internet was made by hand and everything was unique and weird and playful.
To be sure, we could talk about all the highly philosophical reasons: the internet has become too homogenous; tools that make creating on the internet easier have constrained us; nostalgia is king; keeping an eye on the wheel of style, etc… etc…
And while those are opinions and beliefs that we as a creative team* do hold (to varying degrees), the truth is that we went this route because it was fun and because we wanted to explore what it would mean to just say yes to all of our weird instincts.
What would it mean to say yes to all the strange, fun, goofy things that we could do, and fill that framework with content that was heartfelt? To use this playground as a way to share writing that has been meaningful to our own experiences, lives, and journeys as artistic folk.
While we had a lot of fun making the visual elements and coding the website (well coding was not fun but it was funny), we knew it was important to make sure that we brought a sense of thoughtfulness and seriousness to what we were saying within this framework. With this approach we tried to make sure that everything we put on these pages has a purpose. We didn't want to be fun for the sake of being fun - we wanted to be playful in service of ideas we think are consequential and purposeful.
The internet is a beautiful and special place that can be full of personality. There was a time where every website was a different world, every webpage a new unique experience unto itself. There was a sense of wildness to it all - a sense that you might find the most ridiculous and interesting and deeply profound things just like… randomly. You never knew when you might stumble onto an entire community full of impassioned writing and vigorous debate built up from a place of deep generosity, curiosity, and a tender focus on quality.
Beyond that we wanted to use this project as a chance to return to a time when making a website was done by hand - where every page you made forced you to begin with a blank page. No frameworks, no included files, no servers - just a simple HTML page setup: a !doctype, a head, a body.
So we decided to strip away all the tools that we normally build with as people who code and design for a living - we worked collaboratively at every turn. Together we said yes all the time, we laughed (a LOT) during this process. By restraining our toolset and going back to basics, we found that it was possible to approach this project like a truly blank canvas. It forced us to build everything by hand from the ground up. This let us approach making a website like writing a story, a love letter, or a poem – or maybe something entirely different altogether.
This means that every piece of this website was built by hand**. This lead to small errors and inconsistencies and these (beautiful?) idiosyncrasies that are unique and quirky.
Imperfections happen when you make things by hand – and they are what make everything beautiful in our world.
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But to answer your question directly:
We made this site playful and joyful because we believe that's a world that we can live in. It's a world we want to live in. And it was how we wanted to make this project come to life.
* our creative team consists of: Tamara Chu, Danny Jones, Daniel Lucas, Nadine Macapagal, and Jeff Masamori.
** For the fellow nerds: all styles are done inline, all javascript is vanilla and inside script tags, deprecated features are revived. go on, inspect our elements