Vanillaness isn’t even a word in any dictionary at this point in time. But I’d like to use it to express simplicity of design to get some content through, as I believe is (almost) the case with this website.

Vanilla JS is an often heard term in web development (basically, not using external libraries for development but just JavaScript “as is” with whatever the browser provides for support) and I quite like the underlying minimalism there. (I understand that minimalism and simple design are not necessarily the same, but there does exist an overlap between the two, and that’s the region I like!)

Personal websites serve various purposes depending on what the creators intend, but the concept has been around for quite a while. It’s just become easier over the years to set up a personal website and share your thoughts and opinions with the internet. Along the way, fusing design concepts with web development has led to various styles and themes being seen in people’s websites with all kinds of fancy animations and graphics - and these things may be nice to look at, but they kind of take away the focus from the main content (which more often than not happens to be the creator’s blog, portfolio, online CV, or something like that). If we take some lessons from architecture and follow the Form follows function principle, personal websites should be very plain and laden with interesting content. That’s it.

Some people do seem to follow this principle (examples include Paul Graham, Bjarne Stroustrup, and Patrick Collison), keeping their websites minimal in design. Plain as they may seem, digging around and reading a bit would clearly show that the content is really top quality stuff and is something that needn’t have any fancy decorations sprinkled around to attract readers.

Taking inspiration from them, I guess I’m in a phase of using the FFF principle (at least for my personal website). It’s just a collection of my thoughts in text at different points in time.