I Built a Website That Redesigns Itself Every Day

This site changes its look every day at midnight, Manila time. One day it’s Bauhaus, flat red, yellow and blue. The next it’s Art Deco in black and gold, or Swiss type on a strict grid. The rotation has twenty-eight styles, and you can try any of them with the style button at the top of the page.

I learned design as the layout editor of our college yearbook. What stayed with me most was the history: how each movement grew out of, or pushed back against, the one before it. I couldn’t pick just one for my own site, so I built twenty-eight.

Every style is CSS only, and none of them may change the HTML, so I write the words once and every style has to work with them. While building, I checked each new style on my phone before moving on to the next one.

When I lined up all twenty-eight, four of them looked like the same style. Toile, Victorian, Marbled Paper and Neoclassical were all a serif on cream with a red accent.

I realised I needed to dig deeper and give more emphasis to the elements that make each one unique.

• Toile comes from 1700s France: cotton printed in one ink, with engraved country scenes of trees, cottages and a shepherdess. I moved it to cobalt blue on white, which is the classic blue toile anyway.
• Marbled Paper is old bookbinding: marbled endpapers, gilt rules and cloth-covered spines. Its book cloth became deep green.
• Victorian kept the oxblood and gold, and leans on its damask margins, fleur-de-lis and ornate frames.
• Neoclassical is Roman inscriptions and Greek temples: carved capitals, a Greek key border, a pediment over the page head, and an accent of terracotta rather than red. It already had these, but they needed to be bolder.

One of my tests clicked a style in the picker by its name, and it passed every day except one. On a style’s own day, the picker shows it as “Pixel (today)”, so that style’s test failed exactly once every twenty-eight days. Now the test accepts the name with or without “(today)”.

Have a look around, and come back tomorrow to see what it’s wearing.