Amanda's Website

#1: The word “technology” makes me instantly think of Terminator or robot beep boop noises, but I love Ursula’s reminder that something like a frying pan or utilizing fire is technology. I forget that technology means anything that creates ease or solves a problem. I definitely got soft hands, and since I’m a good-for-nothing graphic designer, I often think that I should become something serious like a blacksmith or at least learn how to gut a deer to get back in touch with what my grandparents knew how to do in The Great Depression. I am such a wimp compared to them. To pivot, I definitely create websites that fit Laurel’s definitions of “website as shelf” or “website as room.” All my experiences making websites served the purpose of archiving my work or other people’s work, like a shelf, or cultivating a site that I decorate like my digital bedroom.
#2: I have a bookmark folder called “BAD SITES,” and although the title is mean, I love all of those websites dearly. The biggest chunk is old VCU professor websites (which were all recently taken down, but god bless Internet Archive). These were the most atrocious, but also adorable, sites that were clearly handmade. I have said this for years: when you stumble into a teacher’s 1997 HTML website, you know you’re in for the lesson of a lifetime. Vintage web design ran free versus now we have very standardized UI/UX principles (that I do prefer), but it’s so fun to revisit unhinged old internet spaces back when the priority was ugly brutalist function or unhinged fun. And it does feel rebellious to return to this in the age of templated websites, and I am excited to start.
#3: Reading Taeyoon Choi’s Handmade Computer made me think about how disconnected we are from the technology we use every day, at least I just think it's all magic and forget the decades of engineering that it took to be able to make a phone call. I never really considered how early computers were actually people, mostly women, doing calculations by hand, or how much the history of computing is tied to war. It also makes me want to understand the guts of a computer instead of just accepting it as some magic black box. What's up with all that.
#4: 2016 feels like the most pivotal moment in the social media age, I think it's when all the ui got updated to what it looks like now. I really feel like there was a particular social media boom on instagram in 2016 that caused fashion, photography, and branding to take it up like 100 notches because the centralized information overload + accessibility of making art + posting it in one central place caused big brands to realize how behind they really were on trends, so they started paying more attention to underground trends because it was easier to observe their audience than ever before. Every platform is blending together. All these platforms are copying each other—Instagram Stories, Facebook Live, even YouTube jumping in. Instagram is probably the new all encompassing social media platform until it gets replaced like MySpace and Facebook did.
#5: I used to think past generations just didn’t try hard enough to fix things, but looking back, I see they had the same problems we do—quick fixes instead of real change. The ’70s had its back-to-the-land movement, but most communes fell apart.The internet once felt like a new frontier, free and open, but now it's just another resource being drained. Lately, I’ve been wondering if the answer isn’t in scaling up but in making things smaller and more intentional.
#6: i am an extreme minimalist and i love the structure that gives my life. i try to apply it to every single possible aspect or category of my life, including my digital space. i love the feature “delete from home screen” on my iPhone, i use it to keep every stressful/cluttering/ugly app off my homepage so apps like google calendar + pinterest + the weather app + notion can shine. since my chosen path is being a graphic designer, even if i am doing exactly what i am supposed to/being productive all day, it all takes place on screens which makes my screen time atrocious. totally fair that 10 hours of screen time is viewed as a bad thing! for me that translates into hours designing or gathering inspiration + list making or calendar organizing + communicating with friends + exploring music + falling asleep to history videos. i try to keep my doomscrolling to baking/cooking videos and russian people with tigers or panthers as pets. we have the craziest tool of all time in our pockets so i try to make it as meaningful/interesting/educational/relieving as possible.