On Legibility

I used to like my MDMA in the daytime, walking around the city. Pre-parenting days, my roommate, her girlfriend and I were rolling and walking through the Mission, on our way to Dolores Park. We went into a corner bodega for blunt supplies. Stepping outside, I was literally stopped in my tracks; the sky was so beautiful. If you want to herd some people on e, then let some sparkling tinsel flutter in a breeze.

Recently, I watched a documentary on the Panama Papers, which, I confess, felt very relatable. How to interface with jurisdictions, algorithms and humans. When an organization is novel enough to be illegible to older systems, how do they comply with rules and standards, without compromising the reasons for experimenting?

When I think about what G2 is building with Creative Platform, it’s tools for musicians to discern what they want legible to what and whom. Humans at music performances, or bots trading tokens with royalties, each is useful for different outcomes, but serving the same creator.

With AI, we’re going to have infinite apps with access to the infinite internet. Agents, recommendation systems, trading bots, research scrapers, workflow automations are adding to the already crowded feed of SEO content, influencers and scams. How do you match signals in the noise?

In January, with Chones new brand design, by the amazing Jordan Nerison of Times New, I set out to rebuild Chones website. It quickly became an exercise in legibility, who and what to attract and why.

If you arrive at chones.xyz via the home page, it’s mostly flavor text for the initiated. If you’re initiated, then you can smile and go where you intend.

If you’re not initiated, but curious, there’s an emergency exit button that leads to a page, absent from navigation menus, about Chones Digital Maker Space. There’s no gating, just vibe filters.

For algorithm indexing, the Network Offerings page has a big block of text at the bottom of the page with any useful information about what is being offered.

Easter egg hint: find a link in the text on the image gallery page. I hope it makes you smile.