Even on the internet, everything is a popularity game. But designers and artists almost always win.  

Sometimes it seems like all great websites come to us from the ether of this slippery concept called: word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth is uncontrollable, for the most part. Only a few people in the world have the know-how and face-currency to play the viral marketing campaign. Stupid people (or people being stupid) find fame on the internet this way. Sometimes eccentric and talented people do as well, but as a rule of thumb, the more ridiculous or obnoxious you are, the better chance you have of becoming internet-famous by word-of-mouth. Just ask the Jewish “Sexy” of “So you think you can dance?” fame.The reason that I am pointing this out is that I have stumbled across another fantastic design website and it got me thinking about how I find them (or any cool website for that matter). Usually it is by word-of-blog. Someone I like posts something I’d like and I I therefore spread the love by posting about it and thereby keep the chain going. Other times, someone I like posts something I might like where I discover a link to something that blows me away. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Today I’m introducing Coudal Partners  (http://www.coudal.com/) to the whirligig of word-of-blog chainlinking. I found them by crazy change: I was becoming frustrated by WordPress putting extra spaces between paragraphs that I absolutely detested as far as page design goes, so I went shopping on the WordPressForums for an answer. Another girl, whose blog seems to be abandoned or at least has become the product of a busy blog-owner, had a fun user pic that I liked. I clicked, and one of her two entries was about her participation on this website. I love how things like this happen. To the eye, this website more closely resembles the front page of a newspaper, with its serif fonts, headlines and subheads. It is easy, familiar, and pleasurable to read. There is a sense of active news happening right. here. and now.There is lots of information everywhere, which is both good and bad. It is good because you can navigate all over the place easily. It is bad because you can navigate all over the place too easily. I lost the home page within a few minutes of finding the site and had a hard time getting back. The “About” section is woefully inadequate considering how much information is tied into this site and how many side projects the site is involved with. Who are these people and what do they do? Bloody hell if I know. But what I can find is pretty awesome.The writing is grand. Not too glittery or adjective heavy, not too dependant on sounding hip and edgy. The news pieces are to the point but interesting and full of personal voice. But this is not a writing site, it’s a design and art site that dabbles in, oh, just about everything. They seem to rely heavily on active participation by artists from everywhere, which leads into their current title project, Layer Tennis.

Layer Tennisis an art project where two people volley a piece of design work (most probably done in Adobe Photoshop) back and forth adding their own flare each time. It is a match over who can best the other artist at being the Most Awesome. I can’t even imagine participating in one of these matches because to be honest, they blow me out of the water. I’d be embarrassed to show my face anywhere near these guys. Do you think you have what it takes?

Another excellent section of this site is their Museum of Online Museums. There are featured online exhibits that are really neat and might be missed if not compiled here. My favorite is the Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies  because I remember using some of these art supplies in elementary school. The MoFAS rushes me back to tiny, noisy metal desk with flip top access where I’d rub Elmer’s glue on my fingers and peel my fingerprints off or get high on the Rubber Cement. It is when my second grade art teacher scolded me for not putting perspective on my self-portrait’s hair at a time when I couldn’t even spell “perspective.” Rubber cement? Check. Old boxy Apple computer? Check? Bendy metal ruler that breaks skin when used as a weapon? Check and check.

The Payphone Project (of Nebraska) is cool because, I, well, live there.  The Gallery of Girls in 60’s Car Ads is also a fabulous blast from the past. I love how beautiful those women are. Curvy too!

The Swap Meat is a part of their site that shows off some of the crazy stuff fans have sent them. I love how the people who work for Coudal Partners really put their own personality into their work and it’s not just the good stuff that makes sites sell. Another section, Verse By Voice is a project where they had people read poetry on their answering machine while Field-Tested Books is a sort of year in review of books, though that appears to not have been updated since 2006? It’s a little hard to tell. I really love the site and really hate it for its serious navigational short comings and the ease at which one can get lost and be unable to scratch your way out.

Finally, I always like to clip a bit from a site’s “About” section that defines a website’s purpose from the mind of the creators. It’s important to know what their goal is and know if they lived up to their promise (or went in a different direction and seriously need to update something, somewhere). This is what they have to say about themselves:

“The idea is to showcase the agency’s abilities, provide a forum for creativity and experimentation in writing, design and commerce and to test new technologies and tools. The site requires modern browsers, with all the usual plug-ins. We use Safari and Firefox.”

It is short and to the point, which I like. But there is such a thing as being too short and too to the point. I feel like this doesn’t quite cover all the crazy-ass (that’s a professional use of “crazy-ass” right there) stuff they are creating and experimenting with. There are 16 different sections of the site in the only vaguely permanent navigational feature (it disappears on some pages). There are hundreds (maybe thousands) of other things they’ve done, things they’d like you to know they’ve done, and things they want everyone to know they set in motion. Two sentences does not do them justice. They really do provide a place for creativity and experimentation and they are doing wild, wild stuff here. Like I said, woefully inadequate “About” section. Woefully.

Nevertheless, I have to hand it to them. This site makes me feel creativity down to my toes. It makes me want to try out my own limitations and experiment with breaking them. I am inspired and I could waste (or kill) days of my life exploring this site. I could potentially be undone by this site’s possibilities because how can I work on my own creations if I am wasting away locked in the labyrinth of theirs?