App builder Loren Brichter isn't a household name, but some of the features he has created are part of the daily routines of millions of people using smartphones.
Technical innovations shape only a small part of computer and network culture. It doesn't matter much who invented the microprocessor, the mouse, TCP/IP or the World Wide Web; nor does it matter what ideas were behind these inventions. What matters is who uses them. Only when users start to express themselves with these technical innovations do they truly become relevant to culture at large.
Users' endeavors, like glittering star backgrounds, photos of cute kittens and rainbow gradients, are mostly derided as kitsch or in the most extreme cases, postulated as the end of culture itself. In fact this evolving vernacular, created by users for users, is the most important, beautiful and misunderstood language of new media.
As the first book of its kind, this reader contains essays and projects investigating many different facets of Digital Folklore: online amateur culture, DIY electronics, dirtstyle, typo-nihilism, memes, teapots, penis enlargement …
… web developer, writer, and consultant based in Hveragerði, Iceland.
I write about web dev, interactive media, digital publishing, and product development.
Web Design | History of Web Design | Weird Websites
In the late ‘90s, an obscure site called Superbad pioneered jarringly bizarre, often ugly, but occasionally beautiful web design. It’s taken all this time for the rest of the internet to catch up.