the_author| March 30, 2023

r/goalsandchoices My primary goal while designing this site was to recreate the experience I had while curating this archive for my readers. I wanted them to feel like they were diving deep into the internet—into forums, wikis and related searches—and getting lost in overwhelming, but morbidly interesting, online ‘rabbit holes’. To do this, I chose to design my site to resemble the types of online forums where this kind of discourse frequently takes place. Reddit, a popular online forum where users converse about just-about-anything using tags that begin with “r/”, was one of my biggest visual inspirations for this project, along with fan-made forums like Wikitubia. I actually used “r/” in the headings of my ‘forum posts’ to show that I was responding to the topic—adding to the ‘discussion’, rather than just reciting a researched narrative.

From there I used a combination of online tools to turn my blank Google Site into something that resembled a forum. I formatted my text boxes from scratch, strategically type-setting them to resemble how forum posts and search results are formatted on sites like Reddit and Wikitubia. I created the octopus banner image using DallE, an A.I. art generation software. I edited it on Canva, making it brighter and more vibrant. I designed the search bar graphics, along with the typeface for the site logo and the user profile images, on Canva as well. The logo was designed and drawn on Procreate by my friend Kai Roberts. 

I chose an octopus as my site's mascot for a few reasons. I was initially inspired by the cover of Jenny Rice’s Awful Archives, which features a surrealist painting of a girl with octopus tentacles sprouting from her neck. When I first saw that image, I was immediately reminded of Lovecraftian horror, in which the creatures of the deep ocean are often depicted as great horrors. This image of a deep sea monster began to form in my mind and it aligned perfectly with how I was beginning to see doxxing: as a monster that exists in the deepest, darkest depths of the internet. The site logo, which is an image of a skull with tentacles piercing through it, was also inspired by the Awful Archives cover. 

The entire site is very stylized. I wanted the reader to feel like they had been swallowed by this forum—to be fully immersed in the narrative I was building, both through the text and the visuals. For that reason, I included very few images on this site. This may seem unconventional for a web text, but I felt like the more images I added the more the reader was being pulled out of that stylized reality I had built. Moreover, forums typically have very few images, with the discourse on the sites being very text-heavy. I feel this choice both maintains the reader experience I was hoping to achieve and keeps in line with the forum-inspired design of the site. 

Unfortunately, the collapsible text boxes I was using to make the wiki posts expand when clicked on didn’t allow me to weave images into the text—meaning that if I did want to include photos I would either have to insert them outside of the text box or sacrifice the drop-down function. In the end, I chose to prioritize the collapsable function as it felt important to the overall vibe of the site and instead decided to include a ‘related image’ section as if it had come up as a separate gallery since such things aren’t uncommon on informal wiki sites and forums.