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Hi everyone,
Welcome to our class newsletter. This is the first issue —
We are the Spring 2025 class officially titled VIS 208. Graphic Design: Link, at Princeton University, taught by Laurel Schwulst (who is writing this introduction). But this semester, the theme for the class is “Gifting.” We are exploring websites & everyday digital tools as opportunities for generosity...
In that line of thinking, we wondered: Can a newsletter feel like a gift? And what makes a good gift, anyway?
(Something here about why Laurel decided Gifting as the theme for this year. And share a little about creating calendars, spheres, etc.)
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During the first class, I showed some examples of what I mean by gifting websites, or using everyday digital tools as opportunitites for generosity. One concrete example was the website "You are Laurel, right?" created for me on my birthday by my friend and fellow web designer Min Guhong, based in Seoul.
As a surprise after the first class, Ben created a version of this site for his mom on her birthday, February 4th. It's called, "You are mom, right?" It was exciting to see this, so I asked Ben a few questions about the site:
Laurel: How did your mom respond to receiving the website?Ben: My mom was very excited to receive the surprise birthday website. She remarked that she was curious about the different paths she could navigate through and admitted to refreshing and re-trying different routes to see all the content. At first she thought that I had made the website with a third-party tool, and she was impressed to learn that I used HTML/CSS to create it. I think this helped her see the website as a more personal gift that was crafted by me for her.
L: How specifically did you send it to her?
B: I sent a link to her over text yesterday and told her to wait until tomorrow (her birthday) to open it. She said it was a good exercise of patience!
L: What was the process of creating the site like?
B: It was really enjoyable to build the website. I used the website (on neocities) your friend had made you as a template for the html/css, but I adapted the logic, presentation, style, and content. For the design, I pulled some boilerplate css templates and adapted them to show different colors and fonts. To get the photos I searched through my phone and asked my siblings to share any they had. I tried for a while to get audio playing of me singing happy birthday, but I couldn't get it to work without paying for a subscription to neocities.
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(Some third part of the newsletter here?)
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