The Grand Digital Reinvention

Pujal Gandhi enters the wild and wonderful land of coding. (Photo by Alexandra Hidalgo). 

One thing you learn once you go down the oh-so-deep rabbit hole of web design is that internet tastes and conventions are fleeting. Though not as quickly as you might think. They don’t change every week or even every year. In my experience, it takes about five years for the cool cutting-edge website you made to look outmoded. And not in a whimsical retro way, but in a way that makes visitors’ foreheads crease as they behold the online iteration of your project (or yourself!). By tastes and conventions, I mean things like which dimensions to use, what goes in your footer, and whether drop shadows are a thing (not at the moment).

You might say this need to renew your website over and over is a racket (and it probably is). For me, though, it’s a chance to evaluate how I’ve evolved professionally since my last redesign and how I want to express those transformations. The last time I overhauled my website was 2018. My homepage had this marvelous collage of images featuring my very favorite of my projects. If you hovered over one, you’d get the title of the project, and if you clicked, you’d go to wherever that project dwelled in the vast land of digitality. Here’s what it looked like:

The messy collage of faces, places, and stories I’ve featured in my work.

As dear as that collage is to me (because I adore the images, topics, and people I collaborated with to engender those pieces), it’s a jumble. It features documentaries, book chapters, a video book and videos essays, peer-reviewed publications, film and TV criticism, and an edited collection. For my newest iteration, I decided to organize my work around the three main strands of my career: writing, filmmaking, and academia. With that in mind, I needed to find people with some magic coding powers to help me make it all happen.

I’m infinitely fortunate to have hired two University of Pittsburgh seniors, Pujal Gandhi (Computer Science) and Emily Vaiz (Digital Narrative and Interactive Design), to help me design, code, and experiment. We started by looking at the websites of writers we admired (Lily King, Emily Henry, Gabrielle Zevin, Ann Patchett) and seeing how we could translate their styles and choices into something that worked for what I wanted to convey about my work.

A bit of humor goes a long way when facing the coding demons, as Pujal Gandhi, me, and Emily Vaiz have learned. (Photo by Brooke McEvoy).

We’ve met weekly since September to play with colors and animation and to navigate the quirks of html and Wordpress. Week after week, these two undaunted, unstoppable women worked together and independently to battle the capricious world of coding until we came up with something that works—at least for the next five years. You can check out my latest reinvention here.

Unearthed Photo

My Grandmother Olga Briceño with her marvelous lace collar, her pen, and her contemplative gaze.

Anytime I ponder new directions for myself, I think about my grandmother Olga Briceño, who spent her life reinventing herself around her ability to put words together. In 1934 (when she was only 22!), she published her first book, Bolívar criollo, in Spain. She was 81 when she published her last book, Bajo esos techos rojos, in Venezuela in 1993. During the six decades in between, Grandmother had all sorts of odd and sometimes glamorous writing jobs in Europe, Latin America, and the US. Here is the portrait they took of her for her job as an editor at a company called GUIA, which touts itself as a “Gateway to World Markets” and seems to be a list of businesses in the US and Latin America.

I’m amused by how the photographer spread versions of the publication around her desk and gave her what looks like a memo to hold as if she were about to mark it up with her fountain pen. Do editors edit memos? Probably not, but I think Grandmother sells it. If not the fact that she’s editing, at least the mystique of a person who works with words. Her expression is thoughtful, her smile small enough not to seem fake, her posture perfect. It always was. Having taken many of my own portraits with pens and paper to symbolize the art of writing, I recognize the awkwardness of the pose, and I’m impressed by how Grandmother pulls it off. I’m not sure how long she lasted at GUIA. She was always going after the next big thing. But I’m glad to have this staged moment of her doing what she did best: write and rewrite herself.

Our Snowy Oscar Adventures

As we do every year, we got all dolled up for the Oscars. Then, like the management at my grandmother’s GUIA gig, I decided to capture some staged version of that moment. So outside we went to freeze in the pretty snow in our pretty outfits and share our pretty thoughts on all things Oscar before watching the ceremony. You can check out the result here:

Breastfeeding in Public

Because the “Breastfeeding in the Workplace” scene from my documentary Teta was, for a while, our most popular YouTube clip, I wondered what would happen if we added the clip featuring my week breastfeeding around New York City. Now it’s on its way to eclipsing the other videos on our channel. Hard to beat New York when it comes to great movie settings:

Stories that Transfixed Me (and May Transfix You)

They’re Going to Love You by Meg Howrey

I spent last Sunday hypnotized by Meg Howrey’s first-person tale about Carlisle Martin, a choreographer and former ballet dancer who in her forties finds herself having to reckon with the father who basically disowned her two decades ago as he is about to die. It isn’t just her father but the reasons for that disownment that Carlisle must face in this gorgeously written, profound meditation on dance, creativity, and how fragile yet tenacious family ties can be.

The Eternal Memory by Maite Alberdi

This Chilean Best Documentary Feature Academy Award nominee follows the love story between journalist Augusto Góngora, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, and his wife, actress Paulina Urrutia, who looks after him with a kind of patient tenderness that is a masterclass in love. The film seamlessly weaves their story with that of Chile’s own suffering during Pinochet’s dictatorship and the kind of patient love it has taken to rebuild the country after the dictatorship ended. I know it sounds heavy, but it’s also uplifting and a reminder of the power of affection to turn even our most difficult moments into something transcendent.