A Face for your Content

Web faces are a new expressive layer. Fluid, generative, and personal. A form that adapts to the message, not the other way around.

Until now, when presenting ideas, people have had to choose between flexibility and ease. Consumer formats like docs, slides, and site builders are somewhat easy to use, but at the cost of a fixed structure. You can customize, but not invent. Templates start out looking good, yet break when you try to make them yours.

Software on the other hand, is a rich and flexible medium for expression. A personal OS, a receipt as a bio, space art for a roommate: all examples of work by great programmers, crafted directly in code. But this type of expression is beyond the skill of most people.

Web faces allow anyone to leverage the full expressive power of software, even if they don't realize it. Because at the heart of a face is the user's content, which is all they need focus on. The form simply generates according to the message. Ideas that previously were prohibitive to express on software now blossom on it. Like watch faces, they offer infinite variations that layer meaning and function around a constant. Time is to a watch face what content is to a web face.

The web is moving to a generative phase, where UI is malleable and personalizable. The observation that a lot of software is an interface on top of a database has never been more palpable. Content is that basis, the face on top is ephemeral. Creators can shape their message's look in seconds. Users will consume information as they please. Agents now retrieve and shape content on the fly. Malleable, spontaneous, ubiquitous.

- The team from Perhaps