Tell HN: I let my 6-year-old daughter design my website
We had some free time during the Chinese New Year vacation (we live in Taiwan). So I thought it would be fun to work with my daughter on a little web project.
She did all the drawings. I digitized them and added them to the page as inline SVGs. Then I wrote the code. Nothing fancy — it's just one HTML page with a few links. But I like the end result (yes, I'm 100% biased): https://kevin.tw
Fun technical facts: the page is entirely self-contained (except the favicon). It doesn't have any JavaScript at all. And it weighs 35Kb total (52Kb if you include the favicon).
189 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] threadPractical: no "actual" portfolio except 2 links/why do you want people to visit the site?
Not everyone likes going to LinkedIn to see more about you, since it automatically tracks the visitors.
Not OP, but I hate having to update multiple sources when I update my portfolio. I jumped through some hoops to get around that and I'm still not content with my setup. Not sure if that's the reason OP didn't put his resume on his site, but if it is, I sympathize.
They can see employment details on Linkedin, if they are curious.
I also like the no-bs approach on the technical side. This is indeed a page that does not need a single line of Javascript and it's a testament to what you can do with most basic web technology. I hope this lightness will have its big comeback someday.
I love it!
Save this website for later Maybe it could become a NFT haha
I have made a self contained page as well a few days ago. This is oddly satisfying. I use pixel art to make the illustrations (it's all CSS though).
If you want to take a look at it : https://drdru.github.io/pixel_art_book/pixel-art(1).html
Love the outcome though
- download (free) video game tiles
- upload them to https://www.pixelartcss.com/ to turn them into CSS
- use this tool (kindly made by thecodingfox a few days ago) to place the tiles on a grid and create the whole image from the CSS returned by pixelartcss : https://www.thecodingfox.com/interactive/pixel-world-editor/
For images I do a different hack, I encode images to base64 and embed them via CSS `background: url('data:image/jpeg;base64,/...')`, or img src. The base64 encoding is not very efficient though, so I wouldn't do this for larger images.
Example: https://merely.xyz (page background has a subtle "concrete" pattern).
https://memalign.github.io/m/pceimage/index.html
One reason I’ve been using “.” as the background in my own PCEImages so far is so it’s easy to see that all the lines are the right width.
When I was younger, I thought it was enough that I was speaking the truth, even if I phrased things harshly. I'd think to myself "they should listen to what I have to say, because I'm correct. If they don't like how I phrased it, that's their problem." Unfortunately, humans aren't robots. If you're going to deliver harsh feedback, it's important to do it in a way where the other person is likely to accept the message you're trying to communicate. Otherwise, you may as well have not sent any message at all.
Because of the filesize, this would be right at home on the 512KB club: https://512kb.club/
Perhaps the next logical step would be to move the blog over at medium to your site.
(JeffTK's daughter, he comments around here sometimes)
In all seriousness, yeah, I agree. It would be an excellent design if the text were more readable. There's not much contrast between the text color and background image.
Edit: Hey, @jefftk, here's a before and after of a tiny tweak I did to Lilly's page to increase readability: https://imgur.com/a/AEAc4pk
All I did was add
to the html element style. Maybe you can suggest she and her sister make a similar change? :)(She also updated the picture)
Simple and to the point. I love it.
The pages look exactly how they tell me they should look, for better or worse.
On a related note: I friend of mine once said that an architect (the kind that design buildings) shouldn't be allowed to be older than eight. Still feels like a low-hanging fruit to make the world better.
It makes me want to see more pages designed by kids, but at some point I think there might be an issue of child labor.
The design feels unique and genuine
Nicely done
In landscape mode on chrome/android, the footer overlaps the main part of the page.
Given the web today, I wonder is anyone still turns their phone. I hold a phone in landscape sometimes, and see 14px of content, a header, a huge cookie choices bar (scroll to see the “decline cookies” button, which leads to a maze of twisty toggles all alike), and an advertising bar at the bottom with a teeny tiny X. Even broken this site’s design is better.
Did the same kind of thing a few years ago. When my kids were in to tower defense games.
https://pettersson.casa/td2/
The implementation is nothing fancy at all. The graphics is done with PixiJS, and there is a sprinkle of jQuery and TweenMax for the movement.
Did she design it as a website? It's interesting that she went with drawings/a piece of paper as the default presentation. (Assuming that was her decision).
To draw a parallel: I got skates for my birthday. I got nothing with skating, I will probably dislike it. I haven't used them yet. But I will. And then my daughter will see how I learn it, and guess what? We already bought her skates as well. If she's anything like me (and she is, given she was late walker and finds playground scary), she's gonna find it difficult. But if she overcomes it, she's gonna love it (like I had with running, hiking, swimming). We'll also go to the swimming pool together. We already got 3 bicycles for different stages in her life, also for her brother (she used the walking one already). Its just that she's occupied with a different goal right now (just turned 4, getting out of diapers, going to school, plus we had the Covid pandemic), so I was & am procrastinating.
I thought it was interesting because when I was 6, it was 1994 and the Web was very different from analogue information, presentation wise, and so I never really tried combining my artistic skills and my Web skills, but now the Web is full of images + videos and everybody knows that using neon text/backgrounds aren't a great idea just because we're not using ink.
So a kid's conception of what can go on a website now is completely different and I thought that was neat. Makes me wonder what a 6 year old designing a website will look like in 2052.
My wife is from Taiwan. Every time we visit I am very sad to leave. We have thought about moving to Taipei.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/taipei-hacker-news-meetup-1-tic...