CPT is bringing the weird back
The “Center for Philosophical Technologies” has one of the weirdest websites I’ve seen in awhile. Somebody really went nuts with RGBA and background-gradient. The UI is almost defiantly irrational, with odd punctuation everywhere, navigational elements strewn around the layout like somebody upended a box of tracing paper, and even their ‘logo’ is pulled apart and scattered across the top of the homepage (literally) at random.
And yet… it’s really quite usable nonetheless.
At first glance it just feels inscrutable, but after a few seconds of playing with stuff you can see there’s a logic to it. It speaks its own alien language, but the grammar is consistent and easy to learn.
Looking at this site makes me feel kind of wistful, like when you hear an old song for the first time in 15 years. This brings back a rush of good memories of the odd and experimental websites that seemed more common in the early aughts, back when the rules for UX hadn’t really been written yet and, I dunno, people were maybe just more willing to try stuff.
It’s cool to see that this kind of experimentation — this kind of wonderful fun weirdness for the sake of being weird — seems to be coming back as new CSS features are more widely supported and (maybe more importantly) as I guess we all are getting bored with following formulas.