27 Apr 2023 · MINIMAL
The post-Covid era required a new website as I have not only retired my VJ career but also undergone a phase of personal growth and reorientation I wanted to see reflected on my digital front door.
After many ideas and sketches revolving around complex moiré patterned parallax effects and a very visual approach I settled with the complete opposite: minimalist and text driven.
To pay an hommage to my earliest days of creativity with digital technology I went with a design that reflects the "UX" of a personal computer running a DOS operating system. Just like the one I was tinkering with in my mid 1990s teenage years on my dad's discarded 80286 machine on which I had taught myself typewriting, programming in QBASIC, and using word processing software in all kinds of artistic manners.
A bulletin board. I tried setting up a few of the real ones first and gave up somewhere in their configuration, which has not become friendlier in thirty years, so I took the DOS application instead: Turbo Vision chrome, a menu bar, a clock in the corner. The right machine running the wrong program.
It is a board now. Eighty columns of CP437 on black, the sixteen colour EGA palette, message areas you pick by number and a prompt at the bottom that takes them. Articles are messages and carry the header a Fidonet reader would have shown. A missing page says NO CARRIER, because there is no other correct answer.
The masthead is set in Syndicate, a TheDraw font from the period, found by reading 3711 of them and keeping the ones that fit RANDOGOTH into 80 columns. It draws a different palette each time you arrive. That is the only decoration here that is also the subject.
None of it needed a BBS package in the end. It is a static site generator and about two hundred lines of CSS.