I grew up on the Internet in a time when social media meant writing comments on other people’s hand-built blogs. The sense of whimsy, coziness, and a beautiful lack of information overload are highs I have been chasing ever since.

The Web 1.0 has instilled in me a deep appreciation for a small-scale, intimate, and friendly Internet made up of hand-crafted websites. This is one of them. I’ve been yelling at Internet clouds since 1997.

The most humbling response I’ve received to date comes from the wonderful Simone Silverstroni, who said in his People & Blogs interview:

“Zinzy Waleson Geene has a website that’s a constant source of curiosity. She alters the look, changes typography, structure, navigation so often that following through RSS isn’t enough. When I see a new post, I go check the website.”

“What do you do here?”

First and foremost: as a designer, I feel like I can’t not have a personal website. Even if it doesn’t feature my portfolio projects, through its sheer existence, my website demonstrates I understand how to build a page and a brand. Still, this website doesn’t exist at the mercy of my professional life.

This is the only website I have; it details my personal interests as well as my professional endeavors. With it, I celebrate my curiosity, vulnerability, lack of awareness, and change of heart.

“I thought you were a designer. Why does this site look so… unfinished?”

I don’t know when you’re reading this, but chances are that, when you do, this website looks unusual in one way or another. At work, my days are made up of decisions that benefit both the people who use my creations and the people who pay me to make them. On this website, all bets are off. I happen to love the way plain text looks against a simple canvas. Let’s call it minimalism boring.

Site details

• This website is a proud member of the 250kb club
• Yellow Lab Tools gives this site a 100/100 global score
• It produces 0.00g of CO2, is hosted green and has been designed to minimise the energy consumption and CO2 emissions that result from navigating the Internet
• It is written by a human, not AI
• It’s a motherfucking website, a room, a home; one designed to last
• It follows brutalist web design principles
• And steers clear of how we experience the web today

If that wasn’t technical enough

• After almost a decade with Jekyll, I recently migrated this website to the static site generator Hugo. I like HTML energy, but I also like conserving my writing across many different technologies, apps, and frameworks. Static site generators let me write in Markdown, and keep all of it in a single folder.
• It lives in a private repo on Github, and is deployed via Netlify
• It makes use of Tailwind, browser-native typography, and little else
• I write my private and public notes in a single folder on my computer, and collect publicly available notes in a Github repo
• Currently, the software I use for writing is Obsidian, and I update the notes repo using Obsidian Github Publisher
• It uses h-card and h-entry IndieWeb standards

Copyright

Unless otherwise stated, as per CC BY-NC-SA 4.0:

• You’re welcome to (adapt and) share my work
• If you share my work, please credit me
• You may share my work for noncommercial purposes
• Any adaptations you make, should use the same license

Privacy

I respect your digital sovereignty. I do not track your personal data nor the journey you take on this website or any others. While I do my best to minimize this, please remember that, while I don’t track you, others might.