Friends! Pals! Digital librarians!
Iāve been thinking about what makes a website cool and it all started with this note from Henry:
the coolness of the url is inversely proportional to the coolness of the web project. the best website you'll ever find is gonna be something like libra.v2.progrecali.āedu/oct2023/dept/manifesto.html, but going to etherzoneā.ooo or, say, x.ācom will be the worst experience of your life
I couldnāt agree more since my tabs have been full of funky URLs lately, like the Judd Foundation Library whichābrace yourselfāis marvelously web two-point-oh-ey. Itās a website where you can zoom around the library like a ghost. Make sure to scroll down a bit that page and you can select a set of bookshelves to examine, zoom in, and from there you can tap a book on the shelf and see more info about it.
Isnāt this incredible? I canāt help but look at websites like this and think āAh, yes. This is really what the web is for.ā This is the web at its very best; the web as a fountain of knowledge and wisdom and kindness.
The web is just so cool!
Sometimes a website like this can ruin my whole day because there are sigh websites and then there are holy shit this is cool websites. The latter being the rarest kind; the sort that make your eyes pop out of your head, your whole body tingle. Itās these kind of websites that the web was for in the first place.
So what makes a website cool? URLs first and foremost, yes. I think thatās a good sign. Next up would have to be speed. I wrote about how important speed is when I spotted this new typefoundry website called Marmite Defontes. Playing around with that site reminded me how cool speed is and that, perhaps, itās the most important quality. Iāll take a website without p3 colors, or a website with a bad URL, or a website with confusing writing if it means that I get a fast website down the wire.
Speed has to be the easiest way to make your website cool because itās simply a matter of saying ānoā over and over again. Making a website really fast isnāt particularly hard, itās just a matter of focus and attention (if ya donāt care about speed then your website will be slow). But when a website loads in under 500ms I feel that the people behind this website care about me more than just a number in a spreadsheet or a pixel in a dashboard. When it comes to web design speed is a measurement of empathy.
So: URLs, speed. Okay, what else makes a website cool?
Typographicāwait, hear me outācontrast. When multiple fonts contrast in just the right way. Thatās so cool! Itās also incredibly rare and I start thinking back to big flashy essays like Mr. Columbus that capture the experimental weirdness and frustration of trying every single font in the dropdown and then saying screw it, letās do āem all!
When it comes to typographic cool, itās not about using the latest typeface or chasing the style thatās currently in vogue. Itās about challenging yourself and trying something thatās never been done on the web before. The weirder, the better! Typographic contrast is at its best when I thinkāhow did they pull that off? Those two fonts together shouldnāt work. Huh.
In that way, on the web, coolness is a challenge. But not in the same way that wearing a leather jacket and smoking behind the highschool bike shed is cool. Coolness on the web is different to me. It isnāt exclusionary, but an invitation instead: just how weird can you be? Let me see.
Until next week,
Robin