This Website is A(Live)
Since the time I've had my very first website decades ago, so much has changed about the internet and how we show up online. Shiny object syndrome and a forever identity crisis means I’ve tried it all, various platforms and bio variations and labels to try to perfectly encapsulate what it is I do.
A while ago, an internet stranger wrote to me to ask about my website.
We had a short but lovely email exchange during which I told them, I guess I kind of think of my website the same way I used to think about designing collections, the way my brain was trained to think. What is the theme? How do you take people through a story? How do you merchandise to make money? How do you style it to make magic?
Fashion is always changing, and I love the idea of changing things to shift with the mood of the moment.
Except that’s not how people tend to think about websites. And it sure isn’t how you build a “personal brand”.
So anyway, back to my drawing board to figure out: who am I? I may always be changing, and if so, how can a website represent a continually shifting me? If I could build a website that’s both a settled down and castles-in-the-air version of me, what could that be?
I’ve settled on a few things, presented through short vignettes on the website-making process.
ON COLOUR:
Christmas presents were pens, floppy disk packs, trinkets. Always four, always one in each colour. Sometimes: First come, first served. Or: Oldest to youngest—and I always got drafted second. Other times when my parents were feeling particularly confident that they got it right: green, blue, yellow, pink—in that particular order. I’ve come to associate colour with not just identity, but choice; don’t you dare make the wrong one. And then I grew up not having a favourite colour but desperately wanting one. I’ve so admired and was envious of people who have so easily decided “this colour is me”, and also of people who are either so confident or so busy they don’t feel the need to decorate themselves at all, their websites bare, clean, and “focused on the work”. I wanted that to be me, too—my websites and online identities have always been centred around a single shifting colour, whatever I was feeling that moment, that year. (Most recently it was “Re-blue”, a deep electric blue.) Every time, I felt like I had finally grown up and settled in my colour. But I’d always end up itching to change things. This year, this iteration, I am realizing/asserting: it wasn’t about the right colour, it was about colour. I resisted this for a long time because colour so often feels childish, or 1950s saccharine, or clownish, nostalgia for bygone and unserious things which don’t mean much for grown-ups in the big, bland world of the serious and enlightened, always in a palette of white, grey, black, and beige, or one carefully tested hue. Now my website looks just like my closet, which did not look this way until I rearranged its contents this year to discover an entire spectrum living inside it.
ON CREATING YOUR OWN HOME:
I’d somehow found myself displaced, trying to make a home on the internet in a place I didn’t build myself, all of us caricatures or highlights or salespeople because “go where everyone else is” and well, everyone is here. It never really felt like home. But it had some kind of magic, beautiful and connective and addictive, until it didn’t, and the magic dust settled and we were all in some kind of swiping picturesque wasteland where only the addiction remained, mechanized and optimized to frictionless precision. I posted less and less, and something-something algorithm happened and happened again, and maybe it’s me, maybe people just don’t like my content or they don’t like me. I kept giving it a try, latched onto any sliver of approval as proof I was onto something and all I needed was consistency. The idea that there was something to salvage made me forget that I used to have a home on the internet that was already all the things I wanted it to be. A place where I didn’t need a strategy, a posting schedule, to distill and dilute myself into a square image (or reel, or carousel of images), a place where metrics are a choice not psychological warfare. Why am I being forced to care about likes? Oh right, it makes me weak and malleable and desperate. So I’m rebuilding that place I once had, treating it like the home I once made, brick by tiny brick. All the work that’s mine, from here on out, here first and not begging for approval nor attention elsewhere. Special and occasional appearances are a given (hey, a girl’s gotta market), but there’s no place like having a home you love anywhere, including on the internet.
ON WEBSITE AS GARDEN:
To me, a personal website has always felt like a creative act. I created my career, my life, and my self through my website’s many iterations, and over the years, it has attracted different people with varying tastes to me. I’ve tried different conventions and standards. I’ve also gone completely rogue and coded websites from scratch, more style than substance. I’ve done the one-pager. I did the blog-as-website. I’ve been through so many iterations of the web, all its made-up standards (like: no dates on blog posts, and: first-person bios always, and: open wide for your headshot, and: the sentence is the new paragraph). I’ve had the lame websites and the cool websites—always subjective: one person’s cool is another person’s “does not pass UX standards”. When I wanted to get a job in tech, I went for the first-person, minimalist version of me. When I was building my freelance business, I went with “professional” business card version of me (13 years of experience doing xyz, getting results for abc, at the intersection of—JK on that last one). When Virgil Abloh passed, I scoured my Google Drive for forgotten screenshots of every single failed and flighty project from the one Rorschach-butterfly art exhibition to the classical piano training, parts of me I conveniently left out because I wanted to be taken seriously, that I could now file under “multidisciplinary”. A year later, I removed them again when I started writing seriously. Was it the right choice? I don’t know but I have the choice and possibility and opportunity because I’ve had my website. It’s always been the tangible seed of my self-creation. What’s it been like trying to put me into a website now? Honestly, like it’s always been: a reflection of my desire(s), only now with a higher, clearer regard to A) live and build with nuance, and art, and style, and B) not just belong but assert.