The Web Rebellion Project

November 2^nd 2026

This is a website that has attitude. It is lively, bold and amazingly accessible. It makes you want to look under the bonnet and says hello when you do. ツ If you open the browser console, a message appears:

_____________________________
You opened DevTools. Of course you did.

This is followed up by how the site is built ~ including: Rage, care and Vanilla JS.
… you just have to love that, don’t you? (◠‿◠)

This is one detail that tells you almost everything about the project and it feels a little bit retro, reminiscent of the days when people learned coding by examining other people’s source code. It shows that someone thought about the person who would look deeper and wrote something just for them.

youdidntdesignthis.com

This is my favourite site at the moment! It was created by one of my lovely students, Viola Cherchi. The Web Rebellion Project is her final project (MA Web Design and Content Planning at the University of Greenwich). And yes, I am biased. And yes, I LOVE IT! ~ I’ve written a little bit more about the art side of the story on the Creative Spot. This post is all about the craft, the words, the look, the build and the access.

The argument

This home page puts its statement right up front with a headline: YOU ALREADY KNOW WHAT THIS PAGE SHOULD LOOK LIKE ~ followed by a short list of the typically boring and predictable elements.

Then: THIS ISN’T THAT.

This is such a perfect introduction. Within the first few glances, the first few seconds, you understand that any deviation on this site is deliberate. Anything odd or strange and you will read it as intent, not as an error, not as something broken, rather something presented with a purpose. Such a wonderful approach to design thinking.

The content

The writing on this site is sharp, confident and often funny. It does not only eloquently state points to consider ~ it is engaging and fluent ~ a pleasure to read.

The Manifesto
Numbered statements which are difficult to argue with, e.g.: “The breakage here is cultural, because technically the web works better than ever.”
The Consent Theatre
An intentionally annoying replica of the cookie banner, clicking accept all will do nothing. Buttons are presented at odd sizes. There’s no reject and the manage preferences look like a footnote. As you interact and read, you learn how it manipulates you while it manipulates you.
The Texts
VEEFAX-style: teletext, with page numbers and live clock ~ it will take you back to another era. The section includes various short pieces about specific topics such as “The template ate your voice” or “Who asked for consistency?”
Signed Strangeness
This is a dictionary-style page with a citation ready to copy. Here the site names an idea and gives it a method to spread.

Cherchi, V. (2026) Signed strangeness. The Web Rebellion Project. Available at: https://youdidntdesignthis.com/signed-strangeness/

The design

The visual identity of the site is built on red, black and white. The approach to layout and typography supports the message. It carries it and makes it shine. There is a ticker running across the top adding to the noise and disruption.

The digital language overall is that of system failure: scan lines, glitches and chromatic wobbles. This is rebellion as malfunction.

There is no logo, only type. The visual identity is bold and stronger for the lack of graphics. And this is such an excellent call for a project against visual convention. The site’s typography expresses three voices:

Heavy condensed sans-serif capitals which shout. Used for the strong and high-impact statements.
Monospace as the technical terminal voice, or lowercase as if typed into a console.
Serif typeface to give authority to the longer arguments and elaborations.

What makes this design approach so impressive is the consistency and deliberate deviations. It expresses a strong brand persona, a clear voice and feels very wilful. Every page, every text segment, every statement fits this well-conceived identity.

A journey of discovery

The experiments are a treasure to behold. All I can say is please take a look yourself. You will find a perfect grid that falls apart as you scroll. You’ll see 20 typefaces showing the same sentence and you will learn which ones were chosen and which were merely inherited. There’s a scroll that lies to you and a layout that refuses to behave.

And then there are little hidden gems you should absolutely go on the hunt for:

There’s a Konami code that swaps the whole site for a corporate template for just a few minutes.
This one made me laugh and shudder at the same time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The 404 page features a graveyard of the web encouraging you to bury a site that you once appreciated but no longer exists.
There’s a print sheet that refuses.
Try copying and pasting some text….

Honestly, just go and have a look yourself. None of these have a practical purpose really. But all of them serve the point of this site ever so well. ツ

And then, it’s built in WordPress…

WordPress?!? Really! ~ One of my favourite aspects of this project. The irony of using WordPress is the perfect argument. This is now such a widely used CMS ~ yet it still gets a lot of grief, even though it never dictated boring design. It seems to still be associated with sameness of design, yet it was the designers and the companies and the decision makers who chose that direction.

The fact that Vi used the most common and familiar CMS in the world to create something that looked nothing like the expected templated system is just wonderful. The final site is essentially a radical surface sitting on a perfectly ordinary editorial workflow. There is no better way to make this argument.

Under the bonnet

The front end is pure: HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript. Not a framework in sight, no build step. It is just wonderful to view the underlying code.

If you write CSS, I can only say please have a look. The CSS code is a joy to read. The header comment of main.css says it plainly: “this stylesheet is the argument.” Styling hooks are data attributes, such as data-section="intro", so a state like data-corruption="2" reads as a statement about what the page is doing. It makes use of modern CSS where it helps: container queries, :has() and scroll-driven animations. It is mobile first, with JavaScript kept for the things CSS cannot do.

It is also very light. In our own tests during assessments of this project, we found that even the heaviest page weighed less than a typical hero image on the sites that this site critiques. And amazingly, Lighthouse runs scored accessibility at 100 and performance in the high 90s on mobile. Just very impressive.

Proudly accessible

For a site this bold, and so busy with intentional glitches, you might expect it to shut people out. It does not. That is a real feat. It’s amazingly accessible ~ here’s what’s built in:

Skip to content link is the first focusable element on every page.
The entire site is accessible by keyboard, including the draggable notes on the wall.
Every page is readable and navigable with JavaScript switched off.
Decorative glitch layers are hidden from assistive technology.
Effects are designed to avoid flashing.
The menu trigger on mobile always has a visible word instead of an unlabelled icon.
There is a STILL/LIVE button to stop the motion ~ On mobile, you can shake to switch. The site also respects the reduced motion setting in JavaScript and CSS.
The wall features notes which fade with age, but never below readable contrast. Wonderfully, the web still forgets, just legibly. ツ

It is clear how thoroughly built this site is and I know from her project submission how thoroughly we tested every aspect of this site too. She audited headings, labels, alt text and button types. She checked for contrast and when she came across failures she fixed them. Her thorough approach to making sure that the standard accessibility guidelines were met is just amazing.

She even highlighted that there was one honest gap. The structure is sound and the decoration is hidden, but the screen reader experience of the site’s visual argument is unfinished. What the site sounds like, as opposed to how it looks, is a design question Vi has asked and not yet answered. I appreciated her saying so clearly.

Regardless however, the main lesson here is an excellent one. Nothing in the accessibility standards requires the web to look the way it currently does. Accessibility is structure and not aesthetic.

Closing thoughts

Got to love this project and accept its challenge \m/

The platform was never the problem.
Go ahead and break conventions, but say so and explain why.
Be original, be creative while ensuring that people have control of motion and effects.
Accessibility from the start and all the way through will happily complement a creative and original approach.

Finally ~ please go and experience this site for yourself. No description, nor any amount of screenshots could do it justice.
Also, check out Vi’s portfolio site.