Oslo Observer

Following previous editorial projects eightdaysin.tokyo and nyctim.es, and as a part of the umbrella concept site somewhere.directory, I chose to create a retrospective website based on my previous decade spent living in Oslo. The material is candid in nature, heavily inspired by the street photography genre and created between 2010–2022. A year in the making, the initial inertia provided by a Grafill stipend that thankfully allowed me to take a couple of months off to purely work on this site and somewhere.directory in January 2022. This is an exploratory site, inspired by the old-school web (see: past iterations of radiohead.com), but still with modern usability and accessibility in mind. An optional soundtrack accompanies the project, with a different loop recorded in my home studio intended to thematically accompany each page. Hopefully the user will get lost, but not too lost. Conceptually relying on a sign-based navigation between pages (locations), Oslo natives may recognise this as inspired by the signposts from “turer i Marka”, with page transitions tied to the sign directions. Various media, from photography, writing, drawings, video and 3D lidar scans are presented according to 20 different categories, and an “unlocking” system means that the user must first find their way to the various locations before they are able to access them at will from the shortcut menu and map. I designed a custom typeface for the word OSLO, with 15 axes (including “the face”) in a variable font — the idea being that each style would be tied to its own page, with smooth transitioning between the variety of layouts. Each page has it’s own distinct combination of colour theme and type, with various easter eggs hidden throughout. Good Sans by Oslo based GTF was the perfect fit for everything else. This site was a chance to fully immerse myself into the interactive world of React and Next JS, and differs from my previous one-page-scroll projects,making full use of routing between pages. I have used it as a way to explore various browser technologies — from animated page transitions and type treatments to interactive 3D LIDAR scans, implementing the various features has been a huge technical challenge which I feel has been mostly overcome, but inevitably there is the occasional bug. Performance can also vary, and the site will be smoother on newer machines and Chrome browsers as it pushes the boundaries of memory in the browser. I have tried as best possible to make the experience adhere to web standards and accessibility, as well as optimising assets, though this was not always possible given the amount of photo, video and 3d content. The site is designed from mobile-size and up though the best experience, in my opinion, is on a large desktop browser.