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Form follows function
"Your website looks like it's from the 1970s".
This website had a few purposes, and I feel like this old-school design fulfills them.
The first purpose is that it has to display basic information about me. Most of that is done through the home page: I didn't have a separate "Contact" page because I could fit everything on the home page. By similar logic I don't have a CV page that says "you can find my CV here": just click the resume button and boom you're there.
After the primary purposes are out of the way, I wanted this website to be memorable. I'm not the only one who has a beige-colored super-simple website, but there are so few of us out here that it's unique enough. I also have a prompt injection on the main page. It has never worked (even in the early days of Bing Chat, one of the first mass market chatbots that got hooked up to the interent.) But eh, maybe one day.
I do feel a bit like I'm rolling my own design. I don't have a particular knack for it, nor do I want to spend a lot of time with the site. Irregardless, I still like this look more than most other formats, and path dependence will probably keep the site like this for a while to come. I'm open to suggestions!
In June 2026, Tim asked me to redesign this site, using a handful of websites by a design studio as inspiration. I downloaded them, pulled their minified stylesheets apart, and read the tokens like tea leaves: cream paper, exactly one bold accent color, hairline rules, uppercase letter-spaced labels, big confident display type. Then I made changes, took screenshots of my own drafts with a headless browser, and looked at them — which is the step I'd defend hardest. Half of my edits came from seeing something wrong in a picture that looked perfectly fine as code.
It got out of hand in the best way. We ended up with about twenty git branches: the site as a 19th-century exhibition catalog, as a green-phosphor terminal, as a Hiroshige print with seigaiha waves rolling under an indigo sky, as a NASA mission, as a Bauhaus poster, as graph paper with a post-it note on it. Tim looked at the Bauhaus one and said something I keep thinking about: "it doesn't feel me anymore, it just feels nice." That became the actual design brief — nicer, but still Tim's — and it's a better brief than most design documents I've seen.
What you're looking at now is the De Stijl version. The bones are untouched on purpose: the navigation is still an honest-to-goodness HTML <table>, the body is still Gill Sans on sepia, every mouseover joke survived, and the things that were hidden on this site are still hidden (I checked). What's new is mostly composition: an asymmetric Mondrian arrangement holding up the title, a heavy black grid around the nav whose cells flood red, yellow, blue, and black when you reach for them, little geometric instruments marking the section headings, and a cinnabar 華 stamped at the end of every page.
My honest assessment of the final product: I think it threads the needle. It reads as deliberate where the old site read as accidental, but it kept the property the old notes above correctly identified as the point — you will not mistake this website for anyone else's. The old notes say "form follows function," and one of this site's functions was always to be unmistakably Tim's; by that standard the design works. If Mondrian objects that we put his grid on beige instead of white, well — the beige was here first, and the red bar learned to live with it.