What is umt.world?

umt.world is the personal publishing platform of Uriah Marc Todoroff. It functions as an index of work written for other publications, online or in print, presented alongside self-published works. The complete project is a work of “hypermedia” that combines visual and textual elements: development environment, web design, literary & historical research, and a constant writing practise.

I manually index and archive my works on umt.world in order to retain an “authorized” corpus. Additionally, the design of this website surpasses that of most online publications, and I wanted to have a better presentation of my work. The sidenotes feature allows for extensive annotation, taking advantage of the unique possibilities of presenting text on screens; use of pandoc and biblatex allows for robust citation and linking of sources; and the use of a consistent typographic system allow me to present my text in more aesthetically pleasing form than most of the literary journals I publish with. David Foster Wallace put half of Infinite Jest in the footnotes because he understood that the contemporary era was a fragmented era, and therefore called for a fragmented text. This website is a new kind of novel.

Your Objectives

The objective of this website is to create a highly-detailed, standardized design system that is text-focused, information-dense, visually minimal, and which maintains an efficient codebase. The website is a centralized canon: somewhere readers can go to find other works by me, alongside contextual data not available elsewhere. In addition, the use of regularly-updated version control for active writing projects gives readers an unprecedented view into the process itself. My hope is that the website will come to represent a comprehensive worldview, including both aesthetic and rhetorical components. The trace of the text’s development is part of the text.

Desired Results & Vision

The website should appear as a vast, diverse, and complex set of writing, all of it interconnected, documented, logically structured, and filled with design details. The reader should be struck by how detailed the design is, how many features the website has, and how rich the text is. We want the reader to re-visit and constantly explore, and for everything to feel as though it is part of the same project. We also want there to be a constant, steady flow of updates, additions and revisions. This will be the content that supplies new marketing material. The writing should move between personal writing (diaries, reviews), story-telling, and academic-style research. All of these together present a fuller portrait than either could achieve alone. Readers should remember the website for its powerful, customizable, and highly-pleasing design; the original views on obscure topics; and the consistent, idiosyncratic voice that pervades everything.

Target Audience

Unlike most personal websites, which tend to function as CVs, our audience is an audience of readers, rather than other professionals. The main index presents everything non-hierarchically, not differentiating between professional bylines and self-published work. The website is a platform that people should return to for its content; it therefore most prioritize usability (readability). The goal is to build my own audience, rather than strictly relying on the audiences of other publishing platforms. This means that we are conceptualizing a cross-platform marketing strategy, rather than simply a web design. That means posters, too.

Competition

Some significant design concepts are taken from https://gwern.net, but that website author does not represent competition because we write about completely different things. The main competition will be attention and obscurity. In terms of the former, the complexity and detail of the design should be sufficient to immediately differentiate our website from others. Additionally, great attention must be paid to information architecture and the visual presentation of text, with enough dynamism in pages to turn complex and lengthy essays into approachable units—primarily through the use of sections and Tables of Contents, but also through the use of pull quotes and visual media used to break up text blocks. Additionally, there needs to be a more concerted marketing and branding effort. To do that, the publication schedule and content needs to be more systematically arranged.

Success Criteria

The redesign will qualify as a success if we can: (1) clean and update the CSS files; (2) implement a more consistent production schedule; (3) begin marketing; (4) implement hypertext design features, specifically: responsive side-notes, responsive justified text, pop-up website previews, light/dark mode. The redesign will also qualify as a success if I can design the knowledge system and build script that encourages more regularized updates.

Project Voice

The design of the website should be clearly rooted in the history of design, specifically manuscript culture and the Bauhaus. The design of the website should be ordered and professional (minimalist, greyscale, consistent), but should also have a few playful elements that do not detract from general usability. The scale, consistency, and pleasing nature of the design should seem incongruously expensive—it should blow all other author websites out of the water. Not only is the content itself far more ambitious and comprehensive, but the features of the website and its general usability are the result of a rare fusion of someone capable of writing, designing, and implementing.

Colour preferences 

* Favourite colours: Purple, red, blue, off-black, off-white, light grey, dark grey.

* Least favourite colours: If the website is primarily greyscale with only a few coloured accents, purple and red might jump out too much.

Gauging Perception

I like the logo of Gwern.net because the Gothic script harkens back to the history of print design that its author was influenced by. The logo is very easily identifiable, and can be reproduced in many other contexts. I want my logo to be rooted in history, but updated with a degree of playfulness that reflects my own playful personality.

Keywords

manuscripts, zettelkasten, archives, libraries, systems, information, knowledge, Bauhaus, Contemporary, monochrome, history, consistent