Last week, we launched XOXO Explore, a permanent archive for XOXO, the Portland-based festival and conference I co-organized with Andy McMillan for eight years between 2012 and 2024.

This was a huge undertaking, bringing together every lineup, schedule, recap video, conference talk, and standalone website that we ever made into a single permanent archive, filled with little photos and ephemera from the festival. It includes the final versions of our policies, which we refined over several years and released under open licenses, along with an archive of our guide. We even finally made a proper About page.

This is something we first started talking about back in 2015, and attempted three times, but it was never finished until now.

We’re really proud of it, and to mark the occasion, we made a line of limited-run merch, which you can preorder until the end of the day tomorrow, Friday, May 1. This includes all-new shirts, hats, stickers, felt and enamel pins, but also ridiculously niche artifacts, like a custom LEGO set of the XOXO 2024 festival grounds, miniature versions of the “Lower Your Expectations” sign we hung over the entrance to XOXO 2024, and a zine by Jez Burrows documenting one ridiculous thread from the XOXO Slack that spiraled out of control.

Andy McMillan wrote more about it on the XOXO blog, if you’d like to read more.

A Snapshot of Web Design History

There’s a lot to explore in Explore, but one easy-to-miss detail is the “Website Archive” at the bottom of each year index, collecting and archiving all of our past websites for posterity.

After XOXO started in 2012, we made three separate sites every year, with three different purposes:

1. Teaser. Our first sites were always single-serving pages to announce the dates, usually encouraging people to sign up for our email list to get notified when registration opens.
2. Lineup. The first time we announce a big chunk of the festival and conference lineup, the cost for passes, and details on registration dates.
3. Schedule. These sites were more involved, with full minute-by-minute details of the full festival with speaker/performer bios.

Part of my job on XOXO Explore was revisiting all these sites and migrating them off our paid hosting onto Cloudflare Pages, since XOXO LLC was officially closed with nobody to pay the bills.

Creating static builds of each site, either by recreating the development environment in Docker in the best case or crawling them, was like a time capsule of web dev tooling and trends between 2012 to 2024.

It was different almost every time, sometimes changing stacks in a single year: PHP/MySQL and no build tools at all in 2012, Gulp/Bower/SASS in 2014, Bourbon/Middleman in 2015, Jekyll and Rails in 2016, Node/Express and serverless computing in 2018, Gatsby in 2019, Eleventy in 2024…

To capture the MySQL-backed Rails app that we created for our 2016 schedule, I had to scrape the responses from every possible API query and store everything statically to recreate its dynamic category/year filtering and pagination. Ridiculous.

Some of my favorites from the archive:

• The original 2012 and 2013 schedule sites by Paulo are instantly nostalgic for me. It’s where it all started.
• The 2014 lineup site with colorful geometric illustrations by Jon Han.
• For our 2015 teaser and lineup sites, painter Brendan Monroe made beautiful illustrations in his stark black-and-white style, and then joined us to paint several murals in person at the festival.
• The 2015 schedule site by Scribble Tone cleverly plays with CSS blend modes. (Don’t miss the “Don’t Touch” easter egg in the bottom-left.)
• After a year hiatus, we hired four artists to paint a mural together on a 12-hour livestream for our 2018 teaser. (Click “Watch timelapse” to see it happen in seconds.)
• The 2018 lineup site made by Paulo using a vibrant original illustration from Shawna X.
• The 2019 lineup site by Friends of the Web, anchored by several floral illustrations from Cate Andrews.
• The dark/light mode clicker game hidden in our 2024 teaser, made by BRAIN’s Brian Moore and Mike Lacher.
• The circus-themed 2024 lineup site by Ashur and Emily Cabrera.

It was a big pain, but we felt it was an important part of the festival’s history and worth preserving.

Wrapping XOXO

It took longer than we anticipated, but launching this site was the last thing on our XOXO to-do list. It feels weird to say goodbye to a project that was a part of our lives for so long.

The XOXO festival ran for eight years, but Andy and I ran the XOXO community for over 12 years, as it grew from an annual festival to a year-round Slack community, local meetups, a 16,000-square foot workspace, an aborted funding platform, and many other experiments along the way.

I’m deeply thankful to everyone who was a part of it. The Credits page names some of the key people behind the festival, Slack community, and our web and design efforts. But there were so many more volunteers, patrons, and attendees — literally thousands of people — that made it feel unlike any other event I’ve been a part of.

This has been a very difficult year for me, filled with stress from a family crisis that upended my life and work for the last four months. It’s the reason I’ve largely been absent from posting here and on social media this year, but things are starting to look better.

For right now, it feels good to once again release something new into the world with my name attached to it.

I loved XOXO, which remains one of the most meaningful things I’ve ever worked on. I’m grateful to Andy McMillan for pushing for years to build this beautiful new archive that honors the work we did together.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about how everyone got the viral Will Smith AI video wrong.

Most people believe that Will Smith’s team used AI to generate fake crowds and fake fans, presumably to cover for low turnouts, but the reality was much more mundane: they used AI to turn real photos into short video clips for a montage. The crowds were real, but everyone was convinced they were fake.

The focus of the internet’s suspicions was a couple holding a sign saying that a Will Smith song helped them to survive cancer, which Futurism called “nightmare fuel” with an expression “never before seen on a living human face.” Redditors called it “pathetic,” “vile,” and “sad and weird.”

After writing my post, I was left wondering what this uniquely-modern experience was like for these two people.

How did it feel to have millions of people think that you didn’t exist and were generated by AI? What was the story behind their sign, and what did that moment mean to them?

So I tracked them down to ask them.

Their names are Patric and Géraldine, and they live in Bern, Switzerland, where the festival was held that they were photographed at. I found Patric through his account on Instagram, and conducted the short interview below over email.

I saw that Will Smith posted on Instagram that he was “deeply moved” on the video posted from Gurtenfestival that you’re both in. I was wondering what that moment was like for both of you, and the story behind the sign. How did “You Can Make It” help your girlfriend in her fight with cancer?

Patric: On July 20, we were blown away when Will Smith posted a video of us on his Instagram and reacted to it. It was a huge moment for my girlfriend—she’s been a big fan of his since childhood. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was her favorite show, and as an only child, she always wished she had a big brother like Will.

The song “You Can Make It” got her through her cancer treatment—every time things got tough, the song gave her hope.

With the sign, she just wanted to thank Will for the song and the strength it gave her. At the same time, it was also a message to everyone who is struggling right now: You are not alone. You Can Make It.

Then, something incredible happened during the concert. Will came down to us, and she got to hug him. That hug gave her so much strength and comfort at that moment. As the song played, we stood there, overcome with emotion. Now we know that sometimes the right people see exactly what they need to see at the right time.

How did it feel to see the AI-generated version of you both in the tour video that went viral two weeks ago? Your face is the thumbnail and it’s clearly you, but it does look strange because the video was generated from a still photo.

Honestly, we didn’t even notice at first that the video was created with AI. To us, the moment itself was what mattered, and we were honored that our image was used as the preview image.

We only learned later that the video was generated from a still image using AI. The fact that it reached and touched so many people shows how emotions can be conveyed through new technologies. For us, being part of this moment was simply special.

Unfortunately, some of the press focused almost exclusively on the AI aspect, viewing it negatively instead of recognizing what the video is actually about.

The video is about how music connects people, regardless of their origin, circumstances, or technology. Honestly, we’re saddened by how technical discussions are pushing this into the background.

What was it like to have people convinced that you both aren’t real people, and that you and your sign were generated by AI? It must be strange to have people question your existence like that.

It was crazy to read that some people thought we weren’t real and that the sign was AI-generated.

But we were really there. The sign was real. The emotions were real, too.

Behind that moment lies a personal story with real people, real feelings, and a real background. Sometimes it pays to take a closer look.

---

Thanks to Patric and Geraldine for sharing their story.

As generative AI is built into every tool we use, it’s going to be increasingly common for artists and brands to use it for basic everyday tasks. It’s easy to imagine creators turning to AI to convert horizontal videos to vertical for TikTok and Reels, or localizing videos with translated lip-synced dialogue.

I’m sure Will Smith’s team felt it would be convenient and harmless to use AI to turn photos from his shows into short video clips for a tour montage.

In practice, it had wide-reaching unanticipated consequences.

The crowds were real, but the videos of them were in an uncanny space between fake and real. To turn still photos into motion, details were added that didn’t exist. Genuine people and signs became distortions of reality.

Using AI made people question whether the crowds existed at all, and led to reputational damage that will take more than a Snopes fact-check to undo. It also had a dehumanizing effect, turning some of Will Smith’s biggest fans into versions of themselves that appeared unreal.

Anyone thinking of taking the shortcuts that these AI tools offer needs to be aware of these risks, and everyone — especially the press — should be very careful assuming what’s real and what’s fake. The grey area between the two is growing every day.

This minute-long clip of a Will Smith concert is blowing up online for all the wrong reasons, with people accusing him of using AI to generate fake crowds filled with fake fans carrying fake signs. In the last day, the story’s been covered by Rolling Stone, VIBE, NME, Cosmopolitan, The Daily Mail, The Independent, Mashable, and Consequence of Sound.

And it definitely looks terrible! The faces have all the characteristics of AI slop, with familiar artifacts like uncanny features, smeared faces, multiple fingers/limbs, and nonsensical signage. “From West Philly to West Swig̴̙̕g̷̤̔͜y”?

But here’s where things get complicated.

The crowds are real. Every person you see in the video above started out as real footage of real fans, sourced from multiple Will Smith concerts during his recent European tour.

Continue reading “Will Smith’s concert crowds are real, but AI is blurring the lines” →

For the third year, the Tiny Awards have released their list of finalists that represent “the best of the small, poetic, creative, handmade web.” Voting is now open and runs until the end of this month, closing on September 1.

I was on the judging committee this year, returning after a year away to focus on the final XOXO, and helped narrow down the finalists from 176 nominated websites.

I love this little low-stakes contest, and the experience of being bombarded with so many great weird experimental projects is an honor for me.

Like my roundup two years ago, here’s a little about each of this year’s 11 finalists to help inform your vote.

Continue reading “Vote on the 2025 Tiny Awards Finalists” →

Last week, we released the talks from the final XOXO.

In the eight years that Andy McMillan and I put on XOXO, we had so many wonderful talks—you can peruse the featured tag for some of our favorites from the full archive—but I think we both agreed this was the single best day of talks we ever had.

The consistency was so high, it was clear every speaker understood the assignment. Every talk is worth watching.

The Talks

“We can build the web we want to see.” Molly White kicked off XOXO 2024’s conference with a hopeful talk about building Web3 Is Going Just Great and how we can “push the web back towards the wonderful, joyful, beautiful place it used to be.”

Continue reading “The XOXO 2024 Talks” →