Three web diagrams to enjoy, vol. 2
Or the return of the three things
If you’ve been around the Impermanent before, you probably know that I’m very interested in diagrams as tools for visual thinking, as instruments for representing complexity or visualizing abstractions, and as a way of expressing connections and relationships. In particular, I enjoy websites that act as diagrams. I may have said before that I love the web as a medium, I see it as an almost infinite surface that allows for so much expressiveness and I believe, in agreement with Devin and Nick, that the web hasn’t happened yet and we have yet to discover more ways of creating expressive websites. Maybe I’m already working on it.
As a surface, the web has the possibility of connecting and relating information spatially, besides creating neat looking visuals, this helps to navigate, structure and understand related information. Here are three sites that explore some ways of doing this through diagrams.
1. Hypha’s Digital Public Garden
This site was created as a way of connecting digital and physical spaces, by Hypha, a worker co-operative in Toronto. I’ve shared similar node-connected digital gardens before, they were everywhere when tools like Roam and Obsidian became popular, but this one differentiates itself by its hand-drawn illustrations, icons related to gardening and warm color palette. These details make it warm, very hand-made web vibes. A small detail I liked: on hover the connecting lines become dashed lines, if you know my work you know that I’m a huge fan of dashed lines.
Speaking of dashed lines. This site is made out of overlapping regions, each region featuring websites organized by category like idiosyncratic, html, independent, text, small, etc. Putting things neatly into categories (or folders1) is always hard. It is even harder when you have something that belongs into multiple categories at once. Spatial organization like this makes visible the fact that one thing can belong to multiple categories at once.
This website not only has an extremely cool domain name that I wish I owned, they also have a really cool email address: www@diagram.website. If you have some extra 7.5 hrs to burn and are in the mood of clicking some links and ending up with 204 extra tabs open, this site is for you. Some of those websites deserve, and will probably get, a dedicated newsletter to showcase them. Made by Kristoffer Tjalve and Elliott Cost.
3. Giacomo Nanni’s project graph
And in case the 204 extra tabs open are not enough, Giacomo offers some more with very interesting data visualization and information design on the web. This is the most diagram-in-a-diagram-in-a-diagram of the three because this site is a spatial proposition and also most of the elements inside are also web diagrams. Here again most sites don’t belong to just one category, they overlap multiple concepts at once, something really hard to explain but fairly easy to represent visually. I really enjoy Giacomo’s work and browsing through this site was inspiring and visually stimulating for my line of work. A nice detail: dots become stroke only after you visit them, making it easy to navigate and know where you’ve been before and where you can go next.
honk if you love diagrams
As usual, send me your bookmarks if you have any that could be interesting to me, I’m always in need of more open tabs.
Have a nice day!
– Laura
We’re past due for a change of the metaphor of desktop, folders and files. Every time I see someone’s laptop and their desktop has a million files I know that folders are no longer a good form of organization for computers. We have the technology, what we lack is the metaphor. I don’t think the answer is infinite canvas, tagging, connecting nodes or overlapping regions, but something else where one thing (file) can co-exist in multiple categories. Expanding on this would make this footnote an article on its own, this is a topic I love thinking about and will continue exploring.