Some projects come about by necessity. Building a website is pretty easy when you’re using pre-made templates (i.e. not coding anything), but I’m obnoxiously meticulous so it feels like climbing a mountain. It’s difficult to reconcile having such a clear picture over what I want this project, LITH, to be—the website being one of a few different branches—with how difficult it is to execute the first few steps. I suppose that’s the whole point. However, what I’m getting at is that navigating specifically what I wanted for this website was difficult, and I spent the first five hours on the home page imagery alone.
I’m fortunate that my fiancé is a highly skilled designer and always on the pulse of the AI boom. I enlisted his help, and we spent a Saturday night creating LITH’s masthead—a looping video. I wasn’t feeling terribly picky on the content, as long as it felt like me and authentic to the LITH brand (colorful, organic, intentional). I’m a big fan of anime and have been obsessing over Urusei Yatsura and Ranma 1/2. To tangent briefly, I watched the entirety of One Piece in 2023 and therefore needed something relaxing yet genius to pull me out of my post-binge blues in 2024. Rumiko Takahashi’s romance/slice of life work is that genius. I fell in love with Lum and Shampoo for the same reason as their creator. They are both feminine, bold go-getters, and I can’t think of any two better to be welcoming visitors at the front-entrance of my website. At the time of writing this, we haven’t finished the video yet, but here are the four images we generated to create it.