this week in kiki, 06

That feeling of lacking vocabulary has occurred again recently when exploring the idea of how our digital selves differ from our “true selves”. I had a lot of things that I was trying to balance in my head: how we view ourselves, how others view us, how we want to view ourselves… and then I found that this is well-trodden ground and there are terms for these things. I definitely feel a little silly when I go “oh!” finding these things but it’s kind of validating that I am thinking these things and that there is already a lot of thought on these spaces. There’s also something incredibly validating about thinking about something, searching for it, and then finding it.

I started reading “The Poetics of Space” and found that a lot of the topics there were a little out of my depth. It’s quite interesting, the concept. Basically, the author (so far, I’ve barely made a dent in this not-even-thick book) is making the argument that objects have “renetir” or resonance, an auditory metaphor for how the existence of something has an affect on the area around it and how we perceive these things.

As a result, I’ve been diving deeper into things like cognitive psychology, sense of self, identity, personhood, so on and so forth. Personal identity has been a fixation of mine for quite a while— I remember being young and thinking about it, thinking about branding when helping my mother run her business but lacking the vocabulary to talk deeper about it.

This week, I remembered a site that I had accessed around a year ago but couldn’t remember what it was for the life of me. It absolutely derailed everything I was doing as I was looking through website backlinks, semantic searches, but eventually I found it in my Firefox browser history (which I probably should’ve looked through first).

It’s nothing insanely revolutionary, just a designer’s portfolio, but I found it at a time where I was still really looking for my identity as a designer. There’s something about this that feels rather humble but proud. It feels like there isn’t much ego, as though the layout itself is saying “here’s what I do, here’s the things I want to show the most” with as little fluff as possible.

There’s fun touches: the overlay when you hover a link , the color it changes with some changing to that iconic early-web blue (which according to a friend was chosen arbitrarily based on a favorite color) to white.

The designer’s personality comes out in the different kinds of designs they make, from more brutalist to more experimental type that maybe not reflect their taste but their attention to detail to ensure that the output represents the subject. It is this portfolio that made me think “I would really love to do work for a museum one day.”

The work that truly caught my eye was for the Prospect New Orleans art triennial titled “The Future Is Present, the Harbinger Is Home”. While poetic in nature, its meaning is quite sober: “what we think of as the future is happening in the present, the harbinger (first signs) are home (in this case, Louisiana).” In other words, climate change is happening now, our homes are the harbinger for the world.

The about page of prospect6.org is much more eloquent:

What if New Orleans, a predominantly BIPOC city deeply impacted by hurricanes, receding coastlines, histories of violence, and a cyclical commitment to celebration, was considered a harbinger for the world that is to come?

This framework postulates New Orleans, along with other more climate-vulnerable regions in the world, as already living in the “future” that other places will experience. With alarming speed, more regions of the world are experiencing the immediate effects of climate change and dramatic shifts in economic and government function. New Orleans is thereby approached as a gift to the rest of the world in its ability to offer lessons and examples for how to live in constant negotiation with the weather, grounded within a community that reflects the global majority, and in direct proximity to the effects and aftereffects of colonial and exploitative economies.

The design of the page itself feels very raw with its vibrant colors, tightly spaced headings, and abundant layering of imagery. Ghosts of the designer’s own taste bleed into this campaign but in a way that still gives Prospect-6 an identity separate from its creator (at least, one of— the rest of the designer’s team is credited on their website).

Even though I don’t know this person nor anything about them, this work gives the feeling as though they enjoyed making it. (also, I appreciate how they used a rebus in a modern way that still respects the original intent behind its purpose, something I’ve griped about the style before).

In a much more personal way, the designer also introduced me to one of my now favorite typefaces: Oracle Triple. It was designed by ABC Dinamo whom I had the absolute pleasure to go see talk at Typographics 2025 (This is no formality, I was really excited for their talk which was both informative and funny, you can watch here).

There’s something absolutely a little weird and funky about it but it has personality, something that resonates with my “ah, fuck it I’m doing my thing” mindset.

Some of my other current favorite faces:

I’m very much a fan of neo-grotesque sans-serifs and old-style serifs, two things that incredibly different from each other in both appearance and history (actually, not sure about this one, I’d need to research it to say it with certainty but I’ve already written it so I’m not going to go back and correct it).

I’ve been growing more and more concerned about the political climate in the US. People have been struggling more and more as prices increase while wages stagnate and instead of rallying together to improve conditions, the country has never been more divided against one another. It almost seems as though people in this country would rather see everyone else suffer than improve their own lives.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what defines my personal aesthetic recently. I'm fascinated by branding because it's fundamentally about how our identity—who we are and who we aspire to be—shapes how we present ourselves. At the moment, I feel like my ability to recognize those things is rather limited which is something I’m trying to work on.

Right now, I feel like my personal sense of fashion is inspired by a mix of Steve Jobs & Virgil Ablloh. Jobs in the sense I try to minimize the amount of decisions I need to make and reducing friction in my life— digitally, optimizing workflows and creating macros; physically, keeping my wardrobe simple. Abloh in the sense of adopting his “3% rule”, taking that basic and changing by 3% at most. In outfits, it’s adding one layer, tucking a shirt a certain way, or choosing an aesthetic that may not be expected for a situation.