Designing the politics of connectivity

In 2013 I worked on a project to redesign I and I learned a bigger truth - design for “connect the world” is never neutral. Visual systems can signal openness, agency, and power. Pixels were easy, but purpose was hard. 🌍👇

Logo choices: Reduce the globe to a circle. Set “internet” in Helvetica lowercase. Put “org” inside a negative circle to highlight the nonprofit. Tomato orange for energy. Inspired by Jabong’s dot trick. Good mnemonic, but can confuse across scripts and locales.

The site: A looping banner of faces from Greg Peverill-Conti to feel connected. I moved background-position with setInterval about every 100 ms. Header and nav filled the first screen via Height. My own grid, Source Sans Pro, and simple scroll fade ins.

With 2025 eyes, I’d switch to CSS keyframes or rAF with transforms and respect prefers-reduced-motion. Use IntersectionObserver for scroll. Layout with Grid/Subgrid and container queries. Fonts via system stacks or variable fonts. Also budget for Web Vitals, energy on low end Android, semantics, and keyboard focus.

Reality check. I became Free Basics and hit net neutrality headwinds in India, while Facebook turned into Meta. If a brand promises openness, it needs governance, consent, and aligned incentives, or it reads like veneer.

Original post: https://anandchowdhary.com/blog/2013/internet-org