A launch is only a beginning. Before launch, we utilize all the expertise that we have to bear—on conceptual ideas, usability on different devices, needs of different audiences, forms of storytelling, and how to manifest the creative vision’s intention. But a creator never actually knows what something might become until it’s set out into the world.

In the post that Salem and I wrote on the creation of the project identity, we identified a small amount of crucial elements that we wanted to accomplish with our design. These items included the ideas that Arabic and English should be given equal weight and co-existence in all materials, that the project should have both an elegance and a playfulness, and that a limited color palette should allow the content to speak for itself. For the implementation of the FIND website, we responded to those items and added a few more design requirements. The additional requirements included the facts that the site should have an infrastructural ability to dynamically create connections between content, that the site should be responsive (look good on all sizes and shapes of devices), that the site should communicate with the internet ecosystem beyond the site itself (and allow for the opposite to occur), and that we should operate with an ethos as open source and open in experimentation as possible.

The result of all these intentions may or may not be immediately visible to you as a user. Have you discovered that the line within our logo operates as a search bar for all the hashtags currently employed within the site? Have you repeatedly returned to a hashtag or story universe page and seen how it changes over time? Have you waded your way through themes and people to see how social media, notebook posts, and stories start to gather around creators and topics? Have you posted something on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram and seen it appear within our feeds and our site? Have you looked at FIND on your various devices, wherever in the world that you might be?

This month, Salem and Rob both discussed a few of the above topics within their posts. In the future, we will post about revisions that we will undertake to make the site work more efficiently towards our goals, we will show you experiments that we will create with the site’s data, and we will explain unique implementations that we will create using the content created by the Fellows, Contributors, and team. We’ve already put in a lot of hard work to create what you see, but the FIND site as you see it today is only the beginning.

I approach projects in the spirit of one of my favorite artists, Krzysztof Wodiczko. In his essay Interrogative Design he wrote, "Designers must work in the world rather than ‘about’ or ‘upon’ it." Towards this intention, I am excited to work closely with our team, FIND’s contributors, and the FIND Fellows to create what I think you’ll see are some amazing projects for our Issue 2 launch in March. We look forward to conversing with you about what and how we’re making in the future.