My kids redesigned the internet because it lacks inventiveness.

Internet today is bland. Everything is generic: fonts, layouts, pages, and visual language. Microtypography is messy.

Web design today seems dictated by technical and ideological constraints rather than creativity and ideas. Text and graphics are in containers on every page. All design is assumed.

Ironically, web technologies can design a lot. We can execute most designs. We make shocking, evocative websites. Experimental typography, generating graphics, and interactive experiences are possible.

Even designer websites use containers in containers. Dribbble and Behance, the two most popular creative websites, are boring. Lead image.

How did this happen?

Several reasons. WordPress and other blogging platforms use templates. These frameworks build web pages by combining graphics, headlines, body content, and videos. Not designs, templates. These rules combine related data types. These platforms don't let users customize pages beyond the template. You filled the template.

Templates are content-neutral. Thus, the issue.

Form should reflect and shape content, which is a design principle. Separating them produces content containers. Templates have no design value.

One of the fundamental principles of design is a deep and meaningful connection between form and content.

Web design lacks imagination for many reasons. Most are pragmatic and economic. Page design takes time. Large websites lack the resources to create a page from scratch due to the speed of internet news and the frequency of new items. HTML, JavaScript, and CSS continue to challenge web designers. Web design can't match desktop publishing's straightforward operations.

Designers may also be lazy. Mobile-first, generic, framework-driven development tends to ignore web page visual and contextual integrity.

How can we overcome this? How might expressive and avant-garde websites look today?

Rediscovering the past helps design the future.

'90s-era web design

At the University of the Arts Bremen's research and development group, I created my first website 23 years ago. Web design was trendy. Young web. Pages inspired me.

We struggled with HTML in the mid-1990s. Arial, Times, and Verdana were the only web-safe fonts. Anything exciting required table layouts, monospaced fonts, or GIFs. HTML was originally content-driven, thus we had to work against it to create a page.

Experimental typography was booming. Designers challenged the established quo from Jan Tschichold's Die Neue Typographie in the twenties to April Greiman's computer-driven layouts in the eighties. By the mid-1990s, an uncommon confluence of technological and cultural breakthroughs enabled radical graphic design. Irma Boom, David Carson, Paula Scher, Neville Brody, and others showed it.

Early web pages were dull compared to graphic design's aesthetic explosion. The Web Design Museum shows this.

Nobody knew how to conduct browser-based graphic design. Web page design was undefined. No standards. No CMS (nearly), CSS, JS, video, animation.

Now is as good a time as any to challenge the internet’s visual conformity.

In 2018, everything is browser-based. Massive layouts to micro-typography, animation, and video. How do we use these great possibilities? Containerized containers. JavaScript-contaminated mobile-first pages. Visually uniform templates. Web design 23 years later would disappoint my younger self.

Our imagination, not technology, restricts web design. We're too conformist to aesthetics, economics, and expectations.

Crisis generates opportunity. Challenge online visual conformity now. I'm too old and bourgeois to develop a radical, experimental, and cutting-edge website. I can ask my students.

I taught web design at the Potsdam Interface Design Programme in 2017. Each team has to redesign a website. Create expressive, inventive visual experiences on the browser. Create with contemporary web technologies. Avoid usability, readability, and flexibility concerns. Act. Ignore Erwartungskonformität.

The class outcome pleased me. This overview page shows all results. Four diverse projects address the challenge.

1. ZKM by Frederic Haase and Jonas Köpfer

Frederic and Jonas began their experiments on the ZKM website. The ZKM is Germany's leading media art exhibition location, but its website remains conventional. It's useful but not avant-garde like the shows' art.

Frederic and Jonas designed the ZKM site's concept, aesthetic language, and technical configuration to reflect the museum's progressive approach. A generative design engine generates new layouts for each page load.

ZKM redesign.

2. Streem by Daria Thies, Bela Kurek, and Lucas Vogel

Street art magazine Streem. It promotes new artists and societal topics. Streem includes artwork, painting, photography, design, writing, and journalism. Daria, Bela, and Lucas used these influences to develop a conceptual metropolis. They designed four neighborhoods to reflect magazine sections for their prototype. For a legible city, they use powerful illustrative styles and spatial typography.

Streem makeover.

3. Medium by Amelie Kirchmeyer and Fabian Schultz

Amelie and Fabian structured. Instead of developing a form for a tale, they dissolved a web page into semantic, syntactical, and statistical aspects. HTML's flexibility was their goal. They broke Medium posts into experimental typographic space.

Medium revamp.

4. Hacker News by Fabian Dinklage and Florian Zia

Florian and Fabian made Hacker News interactive. The social networking site aggregates computer science and IT news. Its voting and debate features are extensive despite its simple style. Fabian and Florian transformed the structure into a typographic timeline and network area. News and comments sequence and connect the visuals. To read Hacker News, they connected their design to the API. Hacker News makeover.

Communication is not legibility, said Carson. Apply this to web design today. Modern websites must be legible, usable, responsive, and accessible. They shouldn't limit its visual palette. Visual and human-centered design are not stereotypes.

I want radical, generative, evocative, insightful, adequate, content-specific, and intelligent site design. I want to rediscover web design experimentation. More surprises please. I hope the web will appear different in 23 years.

Update: this essay has sparked a lively discussion! I wrote a brief response to the debate's most common points: Creativity vs. Usability

In simple terms, you probably don’t.

But try. Grandma didn't grow up with Facebook, but she eventually joined.

Perhaps the fear of being isolated outweighed the discomfort of learning the technology.

Grandmas are Facebook likers, sharers, and commenters.

There’s no stopping her.

Not even NFTs. Web3 is currently very complex.

It's difficult to explain what NFTs are, how they work, and why we might use them.

Three explanations.

1. Everything will be ours to own, both physically and digitally.

Why own something you can't touch? What's the point?

Blockchain technology proves digital ownership.

Untouchables need ownership proof. What?

Digital assets reduce friction, save time, and are better for the environment than physical goods.

Many valuable things are intangible. Feeling like your favorite brands. You'll pay obscene prices for clothing that costs pennies.

Secondly, NFTs Are Contracts. Agreements Have Value.

Blockchain technology will replace all contracts and intermediaries.

Every insurance contract, deed, marriage certificate, work contract, plane ticket, concert ticket, or sports event is likely an NFT.

We all have public wallets, like Grandma's Facebook page.

3. Your NFT Purchases Will Be Visible To Everyone.

Everyone can see your public wallet. What you buy says more about you than what you post online.

NFTs issued double as marketing collateral when seen on social media.

While I doubt Grandma knows who Snoop Dog is, imagine him or another famous person holding your NFT in his public wallet and the attention that could bring to you, your company, or brand.

This Technical Section Is For You

The NFT is a contract; its founders can add value through access, events, tuition, and possibly royalties.

Imagine Elon Musk releasing an NFT to his network. Or yearly business consultations for three years.

Christ-alive.

It's worth millions.

These determine their value.

No unsuspecting schmuck willing to buy your hot potato at zero. That's the trend, though.

Overpriced NFTs for low-effort projects created a bubble that has burst.

During a market bubble, you can make money by buying overvalued assets and selling them later for a profit, according to the Greater Fool Theory.

People are struggling. Some are ruined by collateralized loans and the gold rush.

Finances are ruined.

It's uncomfortable.

The same happened in 2018, during the ICO crash or in 1999/2000 when the dot com bubble burst. But the underlying technology hasn’t gone away.

Why breakthrough technologies must be accessible

ChatGPT has exploded. Over 1 million people have used the app, and coding sites like Stack Overflow have banned its answers. It's huge.

I wouldn't have called that as an AI researcher. ChatGPT uses the same GPT-3 technology that's been around for over two years.

More than impressive technology, ChatGPT 3 shows how access makes breakthroughs usable. OpenAI has finally made people realize the power of AI by packaging GPT-3 for normal users.

We think of Thomas Edison as the inventor of the lightbulb, not because he invented it, but because he popularized it.

Going forward, AI companies that make using AI easy will thrive.

Use-case importance

Most modern AI systems use massive language models. These language models are trained on 6,000+ years of human text.

GPT-3 ate 8 billion pages, almost every book, and Wikipedia. It created an AI that can write sea shanties and solve coding problems.

Nothing new. I began beta testing GPT-3 in 2020, but the system's basics date back further.

Tools like GPT-3 are hidden in many apps. Many of the AI writing assistants on this platform are just wrappers around GPT-3.

Lots of online utilitarian text, like restaurant menu summaries or city guides, is written by AI systems like GPT-3. You've probably read GPT-3 without knowing it.

Accessibility

Why is ChatGPT so popular if the technology is old?

ChatGPT makes the technology accessible. Free to use, people can sign up and text with the chatbot daily. ChatGPT isn't revolutionary. It does it in a way normal people can access and be amazed by.

Accessibility isn't easy. OpenAI's Sam Altman tweeted that opening ChatGPT to the public increased computing costs.

Each chat costs "low-digit cents" to process. OpenAI probably spends several hundred thousand dollars a day to keep ChatGPT running, with no immediate business case.

Academic researchers and others who developed GPT-3 couldn't afford it. Without resources to make technology accessible, it can't be used.

Retrospective

This dynamic is old. In the history of science, a researcher with a breakthrough idea was often overshadowed by an entrepreneur or visionary who made it accessible to the public.

We think of Thomas Edison as the inventor of the lightbulb. But really, Vasilij Petrov, Thomas Wright, and Joseph Swan invented the lightbulb. Edison made technology visible and accessible by electrifying public buildings, building power plants, and wiring.

Edison probably lost a ton of money on stunts like building a power plant to light JP Morgan's home, the NYSE, and several newspaper headquarters.

People wanted electric lights once they saw their benefits. By making the technology accessible and visible, Edison unlocked a hugely profitable market.

Similar things are happening in AI. ChatGPT shows that developing breakthrough technology in the lab or on B2B servers won't change the culture.

AI must engage people's imaginations to become mainstream. Before the tech impacts the world, people must play with it and see its revolutionary power.

As the field evolves, companies that make the technology widely available, even at great cost, will succeed.

OpenAI's compute fees are eye-watering. Revolutions are costly.

Key Takeaways:

Another hack. This time was different. This is a doozy.

Why? Nomad got exploited for $190m. It was crypto's 5th-biggest hack. Ouch.

It wasn't hackers, but random folks. What happened:

A Nomad smart contract flaw was discovered. They couldn't drain the funds at once, so they tried numerous transactions. Rookie!

People noticed and copied the attack.

They just needed to discover a working transaction, substitute the other person's address with theirs, and run it.

In a two-and-a-half-hour attack, $190M was siphoned from Nomad Bridge.

Nomad is a novel approach to blockchain interoperability that leverages an optimistic mechanism to increase the security of cross-chain communication.  — nomad.xyz

This hack was permissionless, therefore anyone could participate.

After the fatal blow, people fought over the scraps.

Cross-chain bridges remain a DeFi weakness and exploit target. When they collapse, it's typically total.

$190M...gobbled.

Unbacked assets are hurting Nomad-dependent chains. Moonbeam, EVMOS, and Milkomeda's TVLs dropped.

This incident is every-man-for-himself, although numerous whitehats exploited the issue... 

But what triggered the feeding frenzy?

How did so many pick the bones?

After a normal upgrade in June, the bridge's Replica contract was initialized with a severe security issue. The  0x00 address was a trusted root, therefore all messages were valid by default.

After a botched first attempt (costing $350k in gas), the original attacker's exploit tx called process() without first 'proving' its validity.

The process() function executes all cross-chain messages and checks the merkle root of all messages (line 185).

The upgrade caused transactions with a'messages' value of 0 (invalid, according to old logic) to be read by default as 0x00, a trusted root, passing validation as 'proven'

Any process() calls were valid. In reality, a more sophisticated exploiter may have designed a contract to drain the whole bridge.

Copycat attackers simply copied/pasted the same process() function call using Etherscan, substituting their address.

The incident was a wild combination of crowdhacking, whitehat activities, and MEV-bot (Maximal Extractable Value) mayhem.

For example, 🍉🍉🍉. eth stole $4M from the bridge, but claims to be whitehat.

Others stood out for the wrong reasons. Repeat criminal Rari Capital (Artibrum) exploited over $3M in stablecoins, which moved to Tornado Cash.

The top three exploiters (with 95M between them) are:

$47M: 0x56D8B635A7C88Fd1104D23d632AF40c1C3Aac4e3

$40M: 0xBF293D5138a2a1BA407B43672643434C43827179

$8M: 0xB5C55f76f90Cc528B2609109Ca14d8d84593590E

Here's a list of all the exploiters:

The project conducted a Quantstamp audit in June; QSP-19 foreshadowed a similar problem.

The auditor's comments that "We feel the Nomad team misinterpreted the issue" speak to a troubling attitude towards security that the project's "Long-Term Security" plan appears to confirm:

Concerns were raised about the team's response time to a live, public exploit; the team's official acknowledgement came three hours later.

"Removing the Replica contract as owner" stopped the exploit, but it was too late to preserve the cash.

Closed blockchain systems are only as strong as their weakest link.

The Harmony network is in turmoil after its bridge was attacked and lost $100M in late June.

What's next for Nomad's ecosystems?

Moonbeam's TVL is now $135M, EVMOS's is $3M, and Milkomeda's is $20M.

Loss of confidence may do more damage than $190M.

Cross-chain infrastructure is difficult to secure in a new, experimental sector. Bridge attacks can pollute an entire ecosystem or more.

Nomadic liquidity has no permanent home, so consumers will always migrate in pursuit of the "next big thing" and get stung when attentiveness wanes.

DeFi still has easy prey...

Sources: rekt.news & The Milk Road.

Combining AIs creates realistic AI News Videos.

Powerful AI tools like Chat GPT-3 are trending. Have you combined AIs?

The 1-minute fake news video below is startlingly realistic. Artificial Intelligence developed NASA's Mars exploration breakthrough video (AI). However, integrating the aforementioned AIs generated it.

• AI-generated text for the Chat GPT-3 based on a succinct tagline

• DALL-E-2 AI generates an image from a brief slogan.

• Artificial intelligence-generated avatar and speech

This article shows how to use and mix the three AIs to make a realistic news video. First, watch the video (1 minute).

Talk GPT-3

Chat GPT-3 is an OpenAI NLP model. It can auto-complete text and produce conversational responses.

Try it at the playground. The AI will write a comprehensive text from a brief tagline. Let's see what the AI generates with "Breakthrough in Mars Project" as the headline.

Amazing. Our tagline matches our complete and realistic text. Fake news can start here.

DALL-E-2

OpenAI's huge transformer-based language model DALL-E-2. Its GPT-3 basis is geared for image generation. It can generate high-quality photos from a brief phrase and create artwork and images of non-existent objects.

DALL-E-2 can create a news video background. We'll use "Breakthrough in Mars project" again. Our AI creates four striking visuals. Last.

Synthesia

Synthesia lets you quickly produce videos with AI avatars and synthetic vocals.

Avatars are first. Rosie it is.

Upload and select DALL-backdrop. E-2's

Copy the Chat GPT-3 content and choose a synthetic voice.

Voice: English (US) Professional.

Finally, we generate and watch or download our video.

Synthesia AI completes the AI video.

Overview & Resources

We used three AIs to make surprisingly realistic NASA Mars breakthrough fake news in this post. Synthesia generates an avatar and a synthetic voice, therefore it may be four AIs.

These AIs created our fake news.

• AI-generated text for the Chat GPT-3 based on a succinct tagline

• DALL-E-2 AI generates an image from a brief slogan.

• Artificial intelligence-generated avatar and speech