It was 2011, and I was in junior high school having fun with the internet in an internet cafe. The internet cafe was very popular with teenagers like me back then since social media like Facebook and Twitter were huge.
My interest in web design started in 2009, to be exact, when Blogspot 1was cool. I created a blog where I shared my cheesy thoughts as a teenager, writing nonsense stuff, and then customized the appearance of the blog by implementing fun mini-player widgets, copying and pasting HTML, CSS, and JS that I was not familiar with at the time.
Then I discovered Tumblr2, which is a combination of a blog platform and social media. The majority of users I followed were photography blogs based in Japan. I then continued following anime-related GIF makers until I found people actually making “Tumblr themes” for others to use.
Similar to my experience customizing the appearance of Blogspot, I instantly clicked and went ahead installing one of the Tumblr themes to be implemented on my personal blog. The theme I used was made by Atmospherica, who shared her creations on a blog called Atmosthemes, you can take a look at the archive here
I later discovered that there was a community of people making public themes from scratch, “a theme-making community,” where various people created Tumblr themes. Most of them were a group of young, often female, coders who made free blog themes for other Tumblr users3. I think Atmospherica (her name was Azeela) influenced me a lot in terms of my new hobby of designing for the web, and that’s why it motivated me to create a Tumblr theme by myself back then.
Another influential person in the theme-making community was called Ettudis, or Ans. She created unique designs for her themes and shared resources such as tutorials, which motivated me to create another dedicated blog to showcase my creations.
I created a new blog with the branding name faluvthathemes. I’m not sure where “Faluvtha” came from, but I believe it was inspired by a senior of mine in junior high school whose Facebook username was “Laluvtha”. She had a somewhat public relationship with another girl whose username was “Biluvtha” (this is embarrassing to write, but I want to provide some background on where the name came from lol). I guess it also influenced me to choose this seemingly nonsensical username as the start of my contribution to the theme-making community as a 15-year-old teenager 🏃🏻♀️➡️
You can take a look at my past website here, I’d say it had an interesting design that somehow had a significant influence on another theme maker called Zious.
To be honest, my design was very inconsistent back then, following trends and sometimes taking inspiration from another theme maker called Gyapo. She was a very popular theme maker at the time, known for creating unique designs and themes, and sharing interesting tutorials and tips! My teenage life was adrift like an aimless sea, always influenced by people with no unique identity at all 🥲
- Blogspot, also known as Blogger, is a free blog-publishing service that allows users to create and manage blogs. It was launched by Pyra Labs, which was later acquired by Google in 2003 ↩︎
- Tumblr is a microblogging and social networking platform where users can post multimedia content and follow other users’ blogs. It was launched in 2007 and became popular for its ease of use and customization options, especially through themes and HTML/CSS editing which was later acquired by Automattic in 2019 ↩︎
- Quoted from Medusa’s blog https://tchi.space/blog/2017/open-source-on-tumblr/ ↩︎