Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a learner* from East Palo Alto, CA

 Colophon

Some Notes:

I ended up designing my site by accident. I hired someone, but it was never completed even after a year of waiting. In late March, I found myself scurrying to put something together. My first impulse was to just get something, anything live. Then, there was a distinct moment as I approached the last 10 days of Ramadan 1444 AH and was (and still am) processing the death of my nan, the final matriarch and elder, that I began to  reflect deeply about legacy and intentionality. That this is not a website; it is an extension of my art practice. For about a week, I spent evenings into the wee hours of the morning designing and coding with the goal to make something that was constitutive of my practice, not a holder of content from my practice. 

It should be noted, that I am not a professionally trained designer; I am an intuitive designer.

This website is an art object. It is an improvisational digital thingamajig. I am editing this website very live, meaning instead of keeping the site private until it’s done, I am tinkering publicly. Some pages become password protected at certain times of day while others have no gatekeeping. You may visit the site in the middle of some edits. There may also be some wonky code that may not always work on your end. Sorry, but also, not sorry. I find the hiccups and variability in access to be nice textured moments that remind us of the human behind the process. And quite honestly, the most fun I have had over the last thirty years of being on the internet has been the detours initiated by a website owner’s sloppy code, missing links, and or full abadonment of projects. A lot of my code could be categorized as spaghetti code and I am still unsure if I find deep beauty or annoyance in that categorization. 

Second, this declaration of “I am not a professionally trained designer; I am an intuitive designer” means I make choices based upon how the feel, rather than if they meet a specific design rule. If there are things I am supposed to do in designing this site, I bet I didn’t do them.


Image Source
As a pre-teen, I got my first chance to code and design as a member of Plugged-In Enterprises.



Coding and design felt like a little bit of magic -- typing out a formula or engaging in a set of rituals to reach a certain end. Since at 13, I have not publicly returned to design and code.


Image Source

Privately, I do a lot of design and code work - from designing the 2019 iteration of No New Theories to spending a lot of time crafting bespoke slidedecks under the affordances of google docs and slides to create documents that feel like art pieces. One day, I will share them. In 2020, after being invited to teach at the School for Poetic Computation, my desire to think about the poetics of design were reinvigorated, and here we are.  

I am inspired by the ethos of Chia Amisola (specifically, this project) and Laurel Schwulst’s essay, My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be? 

The site is best viewed on a desktop.

This domain, www.kameelahr.com was first created and  registered on 2010-04-07 18:06:08 UTC

︎This website was last revised on 9/10 November, 10:30am-11:00am; 6:30pm - 1:00 am (EST); 10° North; 100 feet Elevation; Brooklyn, New York

︎This website was last revised on 8 November, 6:00pm - 11:50 pm (EST); 10° North; 100 feet Elevation; Brooklyn, New York

︎This website was last revised on 23 September, 8:00am - 11:50 am (EST); 10° North; 100 feet Elevation; Brooklyn, New York

︎This website was last revised on 28 August, 4:15 - 11:50 pm (CEST); 146° Southeast; 130 feet Elevation; Berlin, Germany

︎This website was last revised on 25 July, 12:20 - 1:00 pm (CEST); 238° Southwest; 130 feet Elevation; Berlin, Germany

︎This website was last revised on 5 July, 5:58 - 10:00 pm (CEST); 37° Northeast; 60 feet Elevation; Svolvær, Norway

︎This website was last revised on 30 June, 7:30 - 10:00 pm (CEST); 144° Southeast; 130 feet Elevation; Berlin, Germany

︎ The accent color is #7400ff.  After my Nan’s death and while designing the obiturary, I found these photos of her wearing this beautiful purple skirt and blouse outfit. 

︎ The handwriting-based typeface is my vectorized writing which has shown up in a lot of my publications, slide presentations, and my installations. It is not a font; I literally wrote out each one. I like the vernacularity of handwriting - and again, a reminder, that a human was indeed here. Standardized typefaces make me bored and I love to experience undulating text with inconsistent kerning, skittish baselines, and goofy apertures. I understand typography, I just do not always enjoy following the rules. If I had the time to handwrite the whole site, I would.



︎ The main font is Bradford by Lineto.

︎ For type inspiration, I also pull from my archive of Black North American printed matter.
For example, the draggable  on the homepage comes from the Amiri Baraka publication below:

︎ The favicon  is sourced from the Noun Project.

︎ The header icons are annotations and noise from my archive and past work.

︎ The text hover effects come from Ian Lunn’s Hoover.css.

︎ Image rotation of 1.1 degrees is inspired by the 1.1 degree rotation of graphene layers out of alignment to reveal new properties.

︎ The javascript, CSS, and HTML for the randomized links was sourced and edited from here, here, here and here.

︎ The javascript, CSS, and HTML for the text reveal on click was sourced and edited from here, here, here, here, and here.

︎ CSS and HTML for footnote feature was sourced and edited from here.

I am currently working to update as many images as possible with Alt-Text using the alt text as poetry framework developed by Finnegan Shannon and Bojana Coklyat.