The HTML Leaf Book

This garden was planted by Spencer Chang for the 2nd issue of thehtml.review in Spring 2023.

html garden is an attempt to imagine what a "seasonal website" looks like, one that rewards visitors for coming back and noticing, a very different and radical act from the way large platforms force interface changes. Visitors are encouraged to take a stroll through and use their inherent browser mechanisms to zoom in and take a closer peek at the plants that call to them.

html garden is composed of digitally-native plants, formed from HTML elements that simulate the growth patterns of real plants (backed by a grammar that means you could create your own plant!). Returning repeatedly will reward you with the sights of growth in each plant along with budding offspring, and you might just find new species as you come to become a regular at this neighborhood garden. The slow growth of the website day-to-day invites returning to the same place on the internet and bearing witness to its change.

This was such a joy (and at times an absolute struggle) to create, play with, and learn from, from not only creating a poetic website, with all the interactions and details that delight, but also creating a system on top of p5js to "draw" with html elements rather than lines using the logic of l-systems.

This project wouldn't have come into being without the inspiration and learnings from Robert Irwin's Central Garden design, Bhavik Singh's work on l-systems, and the open-source p5js community.