$DIR>EMPTINESS: An (im)personal website based on constraints and restrictions

[$DIR]

Hello all! I wanted to share the site that has been my obsession over the past few months, $DIR>EMPTINESS.

When I found the internet I fell in love with *coughs in old* years ago was still alive and well, I wanted to see if my brain still held on to the coding ability I had cherished in the days of Angelfire sites and Xanga layouts. Thus the journey to carve out a personal space on Neocities began.

One thing I learned over the years is that sometimes the best art is created within constraints. Limitations breed creativity, after all. So I gave myself limitations on how I could make this site, and added more as time went on. Here are the rules I operate under:

• No Images Allowed - All page designs will come from code rather than images such as tiled backgrounds, gifs, etc.
• Single Screen Designs - Everything must be self-contained with no scroll bars needed.
• Unique Pages - Each page must have a different design and layout. The consistency is inconsistency.
• Theming - All pages fall under the design aesthetics of cyberpunk, brutalism, retro-futurism, or a combination of the three.
• Learn Something New - Each new page must implement something I've not used before.
• "Branding" - The title of the website and the current page name must be prevalent design elements.
• Impersonal - Be as detached and impersonal as possible. I as a person do not exist on the site, the site is the identity.

These rules have ensured that every step I make in adding something new to the site is steeped in intention, and requiring all my attention. Do I want to add a new page? I know I'm going to be starting from scratch because it can't look like something I've already uploaded. Do I want to create an 88x31 button so other people can link to me? Well I better figure out how to recreate one using only DIV tags and localized styles and default fonts.

My current project? Hiding a button that must be clicked/sequence of events/done to play a song on each page.

Anyways, I've rambled on enough. Come by and take a look at the ridiculous thing I have made; I am very proud of it. https://dir.emptiness.io

[Dan Q]

That's pretty damn cool. Amazing aesthetic.

[skye]

cool of you to share your work!! you totally nailed it: your project reflects your design goals and everything's very well done. I see you put having the site work on mobile on your list of goals  . I checked it out on my phone and the meatspace.html page looks really great on it

[ヤーナム]

Love it so much. Each page having its own unique design down to the nav is so sick. <3

Very inspiring!

[$DIR]

cool of you to share your work!! you totally nailed it: your project reflects your design goals and everything's very well done. I see you put having the site work on mobile on your list of goals  . I checked it out on my phone and the meatspace.html page looks really great on it

Thank you so much! Yeah, I very recently got through a complete redesign of most of the pages since the starting pages weren't hitting my standard after getting back into the grind of putting out pages so mobile has kinda been on the backburner. Also I keep getting the shiny "oooh here's a fun project" that is pulling me away from all my other projects. But soooooon I will be back to making it all mobile accessible!

[Metropolis]

I love the aesthetics of ur site, The idea of constraints so u intentionally make everything is pretty cool. Maybe something I should try implementing on my own site, but im way tooo impatient for that (╥﹏╥)

[Warthog]

This is very stylish, creating this much of a visual identity without any images is inspiring to me as someone who has some complicated feelings around how image heavy the internet is. I find the meta page rather funny, that and the index are my favorite pages thus far.

[stephan_e_perez]

Really cool website! Even though the listed criteria make it sound like an "etude", it doesn't feel like one - the aesthetic is very unified.

Do all of the pages already have a hidden music-play button? I haven't found the one on the Pixel page yet...

[rnottelovesowls]

what a fun experiment! if webpage design is an art form, than you're quite the artiste! and this site is like a whole contemporary art gallery

my favorite page design would be "audio", if only because the whole menu is a circle, and you can change its colors

well done overall!

[$DIR]

All the pages should have hidden players! Thanks all for the compliments :)

[Seechain]

Very interesting, I think that limitations in some cases force us to take new paths. I suppose you can use ASCII art, SVG, and Base64, which technically aren't bitmaps?