"Digital home" zine: A storytelling website about digital homes

As I entered the last semester of my design degree and the bachelor project, I was exploring the world of digital homes. I started to get very interested and passionate about personal websites that go beyond professional goals and are just, well, personal. I knew I wanted to build project that was somehow related to what some call digital homes, but I didn’t want to create a digital home as an academic project. That was too wild of an idea. So what I decided was to explore the web’s potential for storytelling, and the “story” I’d tell would be about digital homes.

The result was a website inspired in zines, and presented as one, really. A project about how we share on the internet, and presenting creating a digital home as the best and ultimate solution for creative people who want more freedom and control over their internet presence and experience.

But today I don’t want to write about digital homes & how much I love them, hopefully the zine already covers that! I might also go into it more in depth in a future post.

What I want to write about in this post is how I explored and played around with web design and merged it with storytelling. Before this project, I had only been a user of editorial and storytelling websites, and was fascinated by their use of the web’s flexibility, creative freedom and scrolling nature to engage and immerse readers into the stories.

I was especially inspired by websites using scrollytelling, a way to use the readers’ scrolling through a website to trigger animations, making the content easier to follow and more interesting, and the experience more tactile and immersive. 

An example I love, which tells a story of a social issue, is Decriminalize Poverty, designed by Tubik Studio. There are many great projects, but I specially love this one for its complexity and creativity. The team took great amounts of information about a delicate and heavy subject, and turned it into an engaging experience that keeps you invested in the topic. 

Pulling inspiration from these amazing, engaging websites, I created my web zine. I structured the written content, made a first static design, used visual metaphors to illustrate my ideas. Then I brought the website to life in Framer, adding animations, applying scrollytelling, creating interactive sections… All with the goal to my thoughts and ideas about digital homes, to try to convince creatives to create their own space on the internet & offer a step-by-step guide to do so.