2025
her. (long story short)Web Design; Experience Design; Visual Storytelling
her. is an interactive scrolling website journeying the emotional push-and-pull of presence and absence, distance and closeness, continuity and loss. Through mapping, abstraction, and material experimentation, the emotion of personal experience takes visual form in a way that is both extremely foreign and extremely intimate at the same time.
The goal of this piece was to be deeply personal, yet layered with enough ambiguity to invite one’s own individual reflection and interpretation. A major part of my upbringing was shaped by the absence of my father, contrasted with the unwavering presence of my mother. Expressing this simply in words was challenging, but necessary to allow each viewer to connect in their own way.
The method of mapping and abstraction was critical to my exploration of both individual and communal experiences. As I was telling my own story of constancy at home with my mother versus the shifting nature of my father, I created an abstract representation of this by mapping the different places he lived on a map, in comparison to where I grew up.
Through my process and experimentation, I found the rhythm of water to be a perfect metaphor to represent the emotion of these relationships.
On my college campus, there was a river that ran continuously between two reservoirs. This idea of a constant back-and-forth mixed with a somehow always steady stream really spoke to me.
From a material aspect, I re-engaged an early experiment I did with layering oil, water, and ink on paper. The result was interesting — a direct representation of both additive and subtractive methods of a drawing.
With these different aspects emerging from my process, I began to fragment and overlay them all together to create a composition.
The design eventually settled into a horizontal scrolling site, which created a pacing and flow that aligned with the overall rhythm of the story.