Rose Fu and Unsent Letters

Stumbled across someone called Rose Fu’s portfolio site today, and was suitably impressed by the design. Markup isn’t quite perfect, but it’s just good to see people achieving this kind of thing with CSS-based design. (Read “this kind of thing”: conventionally very sliced-and-diced table-design).

Also of interest was her very Post Secret-esque project, Unsent Letters. Sure, a lot of it is as bad as angsty Fan Fiction, but it’s an interesting idea nonetheless. I’ve only looked at it for a few moments, but it seems to be generally much worse than Post Secret is (in terms of the angsty teenager thing). The submission instructions say you don’t have to be concise, and I think that might have been its demise — part of Post Secret’s beauty is it’s such a concise medium (sure, it’s visual), and allows some degree of obfuscation whilst still sharing experience or thought. But hey, it’s a different tool, and it’s possibly helpful for people to write to… I just think the fact that it’s published is somewhat self-defeating, because the whole thing really doesn’t seem as though it’s meant to be read. Which I suppose fits with the whole Unsent Letter thing, but it’s not really as though it need be published, either. Shrug. Reach Out! has a similar facility, that simply destroys what you submit. Conversly, I think that seems very futile…

I think Post Secret hits a nice middle ground, that’s concise (hence accessible) and creative (hence cathartic). Anyway… a post about a nice website transformed itself, weird.