To Be Anything At All

Why I made this website:

Because I saw someone else do it.

I made this website because I recently saw one of my favorite YouTubers make one for his political campaign. His name is Gregory Guevara and you can find his campaign site here. If you live in Ottawa Ontario, go vote for him! He will build a wall around Ottawa and secede from the rest of Canada!

(So far his website looks much better than mine.) Anyways, I chose the name To Be Anything At All because it's the line of a song I like called "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea." It captures the feel of being in my early 20s. It's sort of a mixture of gratitude for living this long paired with fear of wasting my life, paired with not knowing what I'll choose to become identity-wise. Not identity like transgender-wise or something stupid like that. More like what job am I going to do, where am I going to live, how will I handle moral situations, etc. Kind of makes me wish for an apoclypse.

Hate to be this guy, but there's something attractive about the idea of going back to a more basic life of shooting, being close to your family, working together for safety etc. I know the closer you get to an experience the harder it is to romanticise it. I'm not alone in this feeling, as a creative project called The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows has a term for it:

Lachesism :Longing for the Clarity of Disaster
That's how much CSS it took to turn that grotesque pile of shit into this easy-to-read masterpiece. It's so fucking simple and it still has all the glory of the original perfect-ass website:

And guess what, motherfucker:

You never knew it, but it's easy to improve readability on your site. Here's how.

Let it breathe

Look at lines 1 and 2 of some shitty website you're building. Assuming they're not married they probably shouldn't be humping. The defaults are trash -- pick a minimum line-height: 1.4 for body copy. Headings should be tighter. If you can't see that...piss off.

If your text hits the side of the browser, fuck off forever. You ever see a book like that? Yes? What a shitty book.

A little less contrast

Black on white? How often do you see that kind of contrast in real life? Tone it down a bit, asshole. I would've even made this site's background a nice #EEEEEE if I wasn't so focused on keeping declarations to a lean 7 fucking lines.

Size Matters

I know your partner says otherwise, but it's true. Bump that body copy to render close to 16px or more. Smaller type works well for print, not the screen.

Line-width, motherfucker

Looking at an LCD screen is strainful enough. Don't make me read a line of text that's 200 fucking characters long. Keep it to a nice 60-80 and users might actually read more than one sentence of your worthless dribble.

Yes, this is also fucking satire, you fuck

I love what the creator of this site's inspiration did. What I'm saying is that it's so, so simple to make sites easier to read. Websites are broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and accessible, but they're also fucking ugly. You and all the other web designers out there need to make them not total shit.

"You're a fucking moron if you use default browser styles."
- Eleanor Roosevelt

Epilogue

Inspired by the geniuses behind motherfuckingwebsite.com and txti.

This page—that isn't a total fucking eyesore—was created by me with help from him.