I’ve been on a bit of a vibe-coding spree lately, building interactive simulations, educational tools, cultural experiments, all through conversation with AI rather than traditional programming. At some point I looked up and thought: what about the stuff I made back in the early days of the web? I identified three projects that had been sitting on my website, built during the early days of the web. These projects were examples of my experimenting with this new language of the world wide web. These sites were mostly hand-coded using bare HTML and had tiled backgrounds, table layouts, designed for Netscape 1.x. Yes, I have been around a long time!
So, I sat down one evening, and redesigned all three, using just Claude Code. My goal in each case was a develop a unique user-experience, visually interesting, intuitive and playful. Take a look and let me know what you think. (A quick note, the third example verse • RE • verse works best on the Edge browser). Here they are…
A2Z: Dictionary of Design
The original A2Z was a satirical glossary of design jargon I wrote at IDC, IIT Bombay back in 1991—and converted for the web around 1996. The landing page greeted you with a Zen koan, a GIF telling you to resize your browser window, and a note that it was “designed for Netscape 1.x and above.” Classic.
The redesign takes the same satirical spirit and gives it a proper typographic identity, inspired by designer Neville Brody’s bold and deconstructivist style. The “A2Z” logotype mixes a heavy sans-serif for the A and Z with a light italic serif for the 2. Definitions are now flip cards: you see the term big, click to reveal the punchline. There’s a random definition button, a manifesto section, and even a submission form for new entries. I also quietly retired a handful of definitions that hadn’t aged well and developed a dozen new ones.
Clerihews
Clerihews are wonderfully silly four-line biographical poems with deliberately clunky meter, two rhyming couplets, a famous person as the subject. My original collection lived in a plain HTML table. Functional. Completely charmless.
The new version is a 3D card carousel: poems displayed on cards that spin into view, with classical serif typography on the front and randomly assigned handwriting fonts on the back (because clerihews feel like something scrawled in a notebook margin). No arrows, no instructions; you just discover how it works. The interface now matches the content: a little chaotic, a little handmade, entirely playful.
Claude and I also collaborated on some new clerihews, a process which had its own delightful stumbles. Rhymes that didn’t quite rhyme, lines that needed just the right comedic rhythm.
Palindromic Poetry — verse · RE · verse
Old Site > New Site
(Note: The new design does not work well with Firefox on the Mac)
The original palindrome site was built, back in 2001, with the latest visual design tools available, namely framesets and dropdown menus. How cool! The poems themselves are the best part: each one reads the same forwards and backwards, word by word. Once I had built the site a few friends, and some strangers, shared some of their poems with me and those were added to the site. Design wise, the old site did nothing to reflect that structural symmetry. It just… listed them.
The redesign starts with the title: verse · RE · verse, with RE at the center mirroring the pivot point in every palindromic poem. That became the conceptual spine of the whole experience. The landing page shows just the word “verse,” which rotates in 3D to reveal the full title. Poem titles float on a warm cream canvas; hovering fades the others away, leaving just the one you’re drawn to. Guillemets (« ») frame each poem, keeping left-right visual symmetry. Every interaction reinforces the idea that the form is the content.
Three projects, three very different aesthetics, but the same underlying process in each case. Start with the content, ask what kind of experience it deserves, and iterate until the design and the material feel like they belong together. None of these arrived fully formed. Working with Claude in each case was a partnership, and in each case I really had no clear idea of what the final result would look like. The design emerged out of this dialogue—and some things I created oh so long ago now have a new life.
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