The Small Web: Making Minimal Websites and Digital Ephemera by Hand

Dates: June 9th to June 13th 2025

Part of IDARE Summer University 2025: “Handmade Digital”
IDARE: INTERACTIVE DIGITAL ARTS, RESEARCH AND EDUCATION

The Small Web: Making Minimal Websites and Digital Ephemera by Hand

Please note: in-person or virtual attendance is possible for this workshop.

Instructor: Reg Beatty

The “small web” is a space where people question how desirable it is to have their online presence pre-formatted and then harvested by a ubiquitous corporate culture. It’s a space that is looking for alternatives to this platformed self-expression, trying to make room for something less rule-bound — something that’s unconventional, unexpected. And one of the ways the small web imagines this might happen is through a return to “making.” In trying to reset our digital lives the impetus of our own making allows us to refocus on the creative process (and pleasure!) of coding from scratch.

This course will take a minimalist approach, showing how a small number of HTML elements and CSS rules can do most of the heavy lifting necessary to make a website. We’ll cover how to coordinate structure, content, and style, including fonts, images, colour, video and audio. And we’ll build our web pages on neocities which, as a community, exemplifies the freedom of the small web.

The more proprietary, predatory, and puerile a place the web becomes, the more committed I am to using it in poetic and intransigent ways. — J. R. Carpenter from “A Handmade Web“

Reg Beatty is a bookbinder, book artist and designer. He has maintained a studio in Toronto since 1992, lectured at a variety of institutions, and taught bookarts and book design at OCADU, York University and Sheridan College. As project manager and in-house designer at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Centre for Digital Humanities, he helped create the new interface and content management system for Yellow Nineties 2.0. He received an MA in Communication and Culture at TMU/York, where his major project investigated the algorithmic book. His work has been exhibited in the United States, Europe, Japan, and across Canada.