Every year, we show off the best stuff on Glitch because we want everyone to understand why our community is special. You can see it in the categories we pick, and the creators we feature. Last Year on Glitch is our way to celebrate the Glitch apps that inspired, helped, and overall made us see how fun, friendly, and beautiful the web could be in 2022.

These apps activate and move the community through organizing, education, and storytelling.

“Black Photo Booth” is a print and web zine by Mariame Kaba, designed and built by @netanoir, that intimately explores the expression of Black people through a collection of photo booth portraits.

These apps show the wonder of augmented and virtual reality in the browser.

Achieving their goal of “native-quality VR gameplay & design on the 3D open web”, Paradowski Creative built this mini-golf game on Glitch that, while meant for play using a VR headset, has a beautiful world that can be explored via desktop.

These apps help the community solve problems, big or small!

Fedifinder is a tool by @Luca that searches Twitter for fediverse handles, bringing thousands of people the power to find where the people they want to follow are as recent leadership change on the platform has left a large part of its community feeling powerless.

These apps look stunning and/or generated art that made us go “Wow!”

Sometimes the most beautiful experience you can have is a simple one. The interaction on @toddwords' small memorial app forces a moment of quiet reflection at your keyboard, reminding you it's good to pause and appreciate the world around you.

~hushed-wheat-chips created by @elvia.vasconcelos and @catilac

These meme-able apps were made to make the community laugh and bring fun to the web.

Have void, will scream into it. Built by @ckolbeck, /dev/null is a hilarious reminder that not every textarea with a submit button needs to actually send every single thought to somewhere perceivable.

~owenwilsonwowmachine created by @arianna1098765

~phone-from-dilemma created by @aTylerRobertson

These playlists curated by the community are always “on repeat” and are our go-to for remixing and inspiration.

@botwiki/open-source-bots-and-starter-projects

The @botwiki team, for years, has been showcasing and educating the community on building bots for art, education, and solving problem. This playlist shares several from the community and is a great starting point to build your next creative bot!

These educational apps brought us offline and into the real world, taught us to code or enriched our minds. 

Relative fiction is a tool by @filipnest that teaches you about, and lets you write through its editor, dynamic stories relative to the reader’s location, time and place. Using APIs like Foursquare, OpenWeatherMap, and more, it’s an incredible concept of using technology for an immersive experience in prose.

~weird-old-book-finder created by @pomeranian99

🎶 Attack of the clones (All the Wordle and Heardle clones!)

🤔 Least likely place you’d think you’d find a Glitch app but it’s there

Post your shave to r/wetshaving “a community of enthusiasts, hobbyists and artisans who enjoy a traditional wet shave: brush, soap, and safety or straight razor”

🕺 Number of times our Director of Community’s been rickrolled by a Glitch app

12: jenn-realtime-rickroll-counter.glitch.me

For more 2022 goodness check out some of the best from around our community in this gallery playlist: 

We can’t wait to see what all you create in 2023! ✨

Last Year on Glitch is our way to celebrate the Glitch apps that inspired, helped, and overall made us see how fun, friendly, and beautiful the web could be in 2022.

Last Year on Glitch 2022

Glitch is a home to many different types of communities. There are builders, students, artists, virtual reality enthusiasts, the list goes on and on. But we want to call to attention a specific community that we are truly grateful for: developer advocates. These are the folks thinking hard about developer experience and working every day to create more pathways, more possibilities, and more connections in ways that continue to inspire us!

Why is developer experience so important to us? That’s sort of a trick question when it comes to Glitch because we believe that everyone can build something online – you just have to create an environment that empowers and encourages people to experiment with code. 

Which is why developer advocates find a natural home at Glitch. We never really set out to attract teams of developers creating and sharing code on Glitch, yet through their own efforts, teams from Microsoft, Twitter, Google, Stripe, Slack and so many others have chosen Glitch to build demos, apps for testing, or just apps replicating errors and possible solutions. Those aren’t the only things they build either. Some developer teams, like Stripe’s have built out entire platforms based on Glitch to better enable their audiences to understand the inner workings of Stripe’s systems. 

And it’s not only teams from big companies taking advantage of the opportunity. Open source software (our favorite kind!) communities have also embraced the openness of Glitch to build demos, or better yet—entire playlists of the best use cases for their code. The virtual reality, augmented reality, or what we like to call, WebXR world has a strong presence on Glitch, with teams from TensorFlow, A-Frame, Needle Engine, and P5.js building out demos and showing the world how they can jump right into creating with WebXR in a few clicks. 

Creating a good experience for folks to get started with is not only great developer experience, but it’s fantastic community building, which is something we spend a great deal of time thinking about. Building the open web means creating space for lots of different types of people to use tools, so those tools have to be good. Encouragement is key after that, because having a coding experience where you succeed pretty quickly is a very positive experience, and who doesn’t want more of that?

Mix all of these factors together and you have the building blocks for what Glitch is all about: enabling everyone to create, building together, success that is celebrated, and lots and lots of learning. Learning builds connections, and those connections more often than not, create community. So, to the folks out there writing the demos, thinking about the README phrasing, breaking down tough concepts so others can understand, thank you for all that you do and we salute you and we’re always happy to share what you’re building! 

Glitch is a home to many different types of communities. There are builders, students, artists, virtual reality enthusiasts, the list goes on and on. But we want to call to attention a specific community that we are truly grateful for: developer advocates.

Why we appreciate developer experience

We made it! The year’s not quite over but this is the final monthly roundup for the Glitch community, because we have a special surprise for you all next month—but more about that later. With so many things to celebrate during this last month of 2022, we wanted to take the opportunity to look back over the past year and reflect on what makes Glitch so special: the Glitch community! 

So for the rest of the year, we’d love for you to join us in celebrating a season of gratitude! All month long, we’ll be sharing our thankfulness for the many creators, projects, contributions, and communities that make up the weird and wonderful world of Glitch. 

We also made it even easier to thank creators, by adding a “Thanks” button to profiles. So join us by thanking the creators of your favorite projects, or by sharing your own thoughts, thanks, or bravos on our community forum! 

And now, for some of the absolute standout projects of November: 

~dev-null by @ckolbeck helps us scream into the void.

~troyperrycerealreviews, which initially we thought read “troy perceives cereal” reviews cereal flavors, which is basically the same thing. 

~salty-admin is a humorous IT blog by @sara-di. It’s in German, but it’s worth translating!

~glowy-earthquakes is an earthquake map built by @RalucaNicola a while ago, and reentered our insights radar after it got a lovely shout out by Mapsmania.

~random-trees-in-circles by @christianp is exactly what the project name is hehe

~marbled-paper by @nonphoto lets you create digital marbled paper.

~beat-coder by @michaelxbarrett helps you make cool beats!

~cute-grey-juice by @hitode909 is a really cool emoji background generator to use for your next big video call!

~winning-solitaire-rainbow by @forrest you can relive the nostalgia of winning solitaire but with more rainbow!

~the-devils-cafe is a trippy game based on a dream that @gatta.lauren once had

~towns-challenge by @bplmaps challenges your knowledge of Massachusetts town names

~discodance by @monolesan is an nft collection of dances which are made with the power of AI and your very own dance moves! 

~fedifinder by @luca has been tweeted about probably thousands of times as people share that they’re using it to find their online friends on different Mastodon instances. Also from @luca, ~mastovue for searching Mastodon instances for hashtags (like #madewithGlitch)! 

~exuberant-judicious-popcorn by @ShrimpandGits gives users daily creative prompts for building maps

~dfk-ap by @dariusk lets you debug as you’re on your ActivityPub development journey.

~critrolefic by @avasalvarez is a critical role fanfic generator that gives you a (friend)ship, a location, and a trope—you decide what happens next!

The featured Glitch in Bio above is from the Media Archaeology Lab, a community-driven hub for preserving and exploring the history of technology. 

And speaking of Glitch in Bio, we’ve seen a lot of new ones recently with folks looking for a way to create their own personal site to point to their various online homes. To make it extra helpful for these new Glitch community members, Jenn Schiffer, Director of Community at Glitch, and Anil Dash, head of Glitch jumped on a livestream last week to show folks step by step how to create their own site. 

Let's make a personal site, live!

Recently joined the Glitch in Bio bandwagon? Let us know and we’ll give your site a shout out!

📣 Call for nominations for Last Year on Glitch 2022 ✨

So that’s another month on Glitch that we’ve had the honor of summarizing and here we are in December, the end of the year. That means it’s time to look back on the last *year* on Glitch, but we need your help!

We’re bringing back the second annual Last Year on Glitch, where we celebrate the best, brightest, inspiring, educational, hilarious, and thoughtful projects on Glitch. Have a project that inspired you to build something or take up a hobby? See something on Glitch that brightened your day so much, you just had to share it? Learned a cool skill from a demo or tutorial? Let us know by submitting your nominations to us now!

As always, if you have Glitch projects or playlists you built or love and want us to feature, either share them on the forum, tweet them to us @glitch or email community@glitch.com—we’d love to see your work in our next roundup!

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~low-rustic-baron, a game designed, colored, and created by @scottsb and his 3 year-old daughter.

We made it! The year’s not quite over but this is the final monthly roundup for the Glitch community, because we have a special surprise for you all next month—but more about that later.

Last month on Glitch, the November 2022 edition

As the year winds down, some folks spend the remainder of it celebrating the good things the year brought them, or the potential that the new year has in store. Others look at the past twelve months and reflect upon the ins and outs and ups and downs that life never stops bringing to our door. 

We figured, why not both? So to wind down 2022 we’re reflecting on all of the things that we’re grateful for as a community, and most importantly—as fans of this weird and wonderful web we’ve all gathered around. 

Gratitude has long been a part of Glitch’s DNA. (Fun fact: Less than a month after this post went out, the Fastly team created their own #gratitude channel in Slack so we’ve always been on the same wavelength). We’ve shared in the past how expressing our appreciation for each other has strengthened our bond as a team – but also served as a guiding principle for how we approach the community. Glitch would not be what it is without you—the creators—and we are thankful for each and everyone of you. Our community continues to delight and surprise the greater web community with your creativity, ingenuity, thoughtfulness, and sense of humor.

The “Thanks 💖” button on creator profiles has been a way to show your appreciation for the individual creators and playlist curators, and heading into this season of celebration, we figured we would make it even easier to spread encouragement around the community.

Previously, you could only thank creators from their individual project page—and you still can! But we spruced things up a little, and now you can thank creators directly on their profile pages, which by the way, you have a fully customizable profile page when you register on Glitch. 

Our hope is not only that you thank the creators of your favorite projects, but that they inspire you to create something equally worth celebrating and the thanks continue until, well, until they unplug the internet. So give thanks! 

In the meantime, we’ll be celebrating all of the projects, creators, and the broader Glitch community through the rest of this year, building up to the reveal of Last Year on Glitch, our annual roundup of projects created by you! 

As the year winds down, some folks spend the remainder of it celebrating the good things the year brought them, or the potential that the new year has in store.

A season of gratitude

The year might be winding down, but the Glitch community is still in full throttle! From Taylor Swift’s Midnights album art to splattering soup on infinite images, to biking back to school and tracking Doctor Who, there was no limit to the creativity the community shared with us this past October. 

We’d like the record to reflect that at this point in 2021, we rolled out ~glitch-in-bio to Glitch Pro subscribers in an early access release, and there are now thousands of instances! In other, more recent news, we just updated our ​​✨Prettier button ✨ to support .mjs and .cjs files, thanks to a push from community member @digitpain. 

Have a suggestion for what you’d like to see happen around the Glitch community? Join us in the latest open thread over on the community forum, where we chat about all things apps, cool projects, and weird web wonders. Making some social media changes lately? Over the weekend @anildash made a playlist of Fediverse apps that are taking off on Glitch, or that are handy for developers learning to build there, so check it out.  

That’s it for updates, let’s get to the fun stuff—your creations! 

~draw-your-world by @enauman has a new update with a great door, lol!

For soup lovers (or haters) check out ~soup-splat created by @derekahmedzai 

Glitch got a shoutout in this AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) post about “y2k aesthetic.” 

~stump-spring-bellusaurus by @vian0nguyen is a precious collection of stories by a couple of friends about some bird detectives.

~bloxylibrary by @Daw588 is a handy search engine for Roblox development resources.

This past World Mental Health Day (October 10th) folks celebrated with ~thought-detox created by @AngeloStavrow. If you enjoy it, there’s a free app version available for download as well.

Local students got to ride back to school on the ~bergenbiketrain created by @daniel73473 this past month.

~notion-pokedex created by @thomasfrank is a complete Pokédex in Notion, built in under 12 hours!

@sogalanbat created the Halloween costume of the year, ~tamagotchi-game-costume, with Glitch and Phaser. 

~rosham by @ckolbeck is a shared game of swarm rock/paper/scissors. We could watch this for hours (and maybe we have...)

~gbbo-judge by @lucymeredith3 is a Great British Bake-off simulator.

~surrender-index is (surprise!) a surrender index calculator measuring how cowardly each punt in the NFL is, created by @kylehill.

The Hand Eye Society hosted a whole mini explorable experience on Glitch at ~hes-superfest-2022.

~nyt-letter-boxed-solver created by @mattly, offers much needed solutions when you’re stuck on the New York Times’ Letter Boxed game. 

@RonakChovatiya reminded us of their VR celebration for the Diwali festival 🥳

~castle-staging by @herbst + @marwie lets you create a room and have friends help you build a castle in 3D. Also check out their physics demo that includes a nod to Glitch, ~needle-physics-cannon-sample 🎏

This semester, New York University is using Glitch to teach A&P with the VR demo ~nyulangone-immersive-classroom.

Get started with Needle Engine using the tutorial ~rhinestone-ink-flock created by @herbst.

~travellog-cogap by @carolynlimadeo is a nice travellog web page from a long bike trip.

~fortunewill by @tdopress finally brings Zoltar to Glitch 🔮

~thiccccc by @keaton.brandt may be (unverified) the most c’s in the “word” “thiccccc.”

~where-who is a classic scene from Doctor Who, created by @mapsmania.

And just like that, we’re into a new month! As always, if you have Glitch projects or playlists you built or love and want us to feature, either share them on the forum, tweet them to us @glitch or email community@glitch.com—we’d love to see your work in our next roundup!

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~taylor-swift-midnights, a Midnights album cover generator by @derekahmedzai, who also made ~soup-splat!

The year might be winding down, but the Glitch community is still in full throttle!

Last month on Glitch, the October 2022 edition

September just hits different. There’s something in the air. Beyoncé was born this month, and so was Zendaya. Our own fearless leader Anil Dash was born in September, but keeping with the eponymous icons, so were Playlists. That’s right, last September we launched Playlists! Have you created a playlist yet? Share some of your favorites with us in the latest community open thread. 

Open thread? Aren’t most forums open threads? No, they aren’t but we’re glad you asked. We realized there wasn’t really an option in our forum for a watercooler-getting to know you-regular old chat. So boom, open threads began! Each week the Glitch team wants to know who you are, what you’re creating, and what you think is interesting, so join us! 

Lastly, if you’ve missed hearing from the @glitchdevs Twitter account, not to worry! You can still keep up with what the Glitch devs are thinking about and building by following @FastlyDevs, so make sure to follow, like and subscribe! And now for our regularly scheduled programming. ✨

~godard-plot-generator by @samplereality is a Godard film plot generator built with Tracery!

~cardinales-y-romanos is a journal of sorts by @v.isforvioleta, with their words beautifully drenched in the Hydra-synth powered visuals in the background.

~ashley-aka-wyrm is the Glitch-in-bio of writer/editor @peripatetic.poetic

~taylor-swift-midnights by @derekahmedzai is an album cover generator in celebration of Taylor Swift’s upcoming album.

~kanjibreak by @fasiha enables collaborative breakdowns of kanji!

This ring light app by @aTylerRobertson has a color picker so you’re not stuck with just white light!

~get-a-recent-bill-from-congress by @airbr uses the new API from Congress.gov to show recent Congressional bills.

~nomore24 by @vickiniu was created to help others push the movement to end the 24-hour workday for home attendants in New York City.

~lookout-keeper was created by @StuartHoughton85754 to help keep his loved one, suffering from dementia, safe.

~what-colour-is-that is an app @christianp built to help with identifying colors when you’re colorblind.

~wave-rebel-albacore is @potch goofing around with combining 2D marching squares and n-d meta balls

~nethack by @huytd is a retro-style in-browser SSH client to play Nethack

~loc-photo-roulette by @lwrubel is a game where you guess the year of a randomly shown photo from the Library of Congress.

~fake-soaps by @mharen asks you if you can find a fake soap among this list of scents 🎃

~camogen by @aceslowman is an in-browser (and in-progress) environment for creating WebGL visuals.

~tasteful-boom-oatmeal by @marwie demos Google’s text-to-3D model generator, DreamFusion.

~maze-cube by @mitch.c.allen lets you get lost in a maze this spooky season without the chill or muddy boots. 

~needle-fonts-sample by @marwie answers the question on everyone’s minds: Where are the project’s fonts automatically exported from??????

Fan of Critical Role? Check out ~critrolefic, a Critical Role fic generator by @avasalvarez.

~imagine-bamboo by @edie generates a bamboo field from tweets, a great way to belated celebrate #WorldBambooDay

~creating-with-data by @digitalWestie is a dart board showing software industry companies in Edinburgh over the years.

~the-queue by @aTylerRobertson is a queue simulator for you know what reason...

Also by Tyler is this much needed pep talk: ~am-i-doing-this-right

With September firmly in the past, spooky season (or szn, if you like) is now upon us! Please send us your favorite haunted apps and projects so we can—most importantly— love them, but also share them with the Glitch community. 👻

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~duck-color created by @rsheeter which allows you to express yourself with the full range of RGB in the shape of a duck emoji. Enjoy!

September just hits different. There’s something in the air. Beyoncé was born this month, and so was Zendaya. Our own fearless leader Anil Dash was born in September, but keeping with the eponymous icons, so were Playlists.

Last month on Glitch, the September 2022 edition

August 2022 was quite a month for the Glitch community, so to commemorate that, here are some standout apps that we can’t wait to share with you. Enjoy!

Go to ~prompt-randomizer, write a prompt and shuffle it to your heart's content with this simple prompt generator.

Soothe yourself with the sounds of ~sea-monsters 🦑 on this cool Glitch project.

~pokemon-card-shader is a holographic card shader by @alexanderameye brought from Unity to Three.js with Needle. 

~oceanic-tiger is a random worm name generator 🪱 for the Worms game community on Reddit and they’re pretty funny.

~peg-solo is a fun solitaire peg game with emoji created by @rowan_m.

Ready to build your own amazing, machine learning-powered, musical instrument? The folks from Magenta.js built a playground app ~play-magenta to try experimenting with code and sound in the browser.

Discover how to generate beautiful header images for your GitHub profile READMEs with ~reheader. 

Or, at the very least, feel a tiny bit better about abandoning your side projects on GitHub 😅

Test your pets for motion illusions 👀 with this Glitch app from @duwcoxtpt.

Want to see a rain frog in space? https://pristimantis-torresi.glitch.me

Want to see a Spinosaurus in the wild? https://xr-spinosaurus.glitch.me/

Want to see a goldfish rock out? https://renderagainken-goldfish.glitch.me/

Want to see pixels grow in realtime? https://growing-pixels.glitch.me/

Want to get lost in a hypnotic emoji-laden illusion? https://illusion-gonna.glitch.me

September means back to school for lots of students around the world, so be sure to check back in with us next month for more awesome Glitch apps that will make you scratch your head, giggle a little, or smile a whole lot! As always, if you have Glitch projects or playlists you built or love and want us to feature, either share them on the forum, tweet them to us @glitch or email community@glitch.com—we’d love to see your work in our next roundup!

The project featured in this post’s header image is @klaus.weidner's ~xr-spinosaurus which allows you to explore both the outsides (and insides!) of a dinosaur in virtual reality. 

Last month on Glitch, the August 2022 edition

If we had to pick one word to describe July 2022 for the Glitch community it would be movement. Regardless of whatever else is going on in the world, the creators keep pushing forward, building apps for loved ones to keep moving through the world, personal economics calculators to keep those numbers flowing, even an app that just bounces around to the delight of everyone who sees it. So take a quick break with us, as we review the new and fascinating contributors from the Glitch community over the past month. 

~bigboxgas by @FlantasticDan is a search engine for “big box” gas prices that looks way nicer than Costco’s app for this.

~real-coal-neon by @camclay helps you calculate what remote work saves you (and the Earth)!

~dekadeka by @noty2008 is a simple page with a contenteditable area so you can click and edit the text. Tip: nice to use if you want to hold your iPad up with a note to a loved one when you’re picking them up from the airport!

~simple-period-tracker is a period tracker that @rahatarmanahmed made for his wife with privacy in mind. It’s a progressive web app and saves the data to local storage instead of the cloud.

~basic-rough-notation by @pshihn is a demo of this really cool library, RoughJS, that lets you add visual notations to your webpage! Check out their playlist for more RoughJS examples.

~cola-calculator by @dphiffer is a cost of living adjustment calculator

~essentia by @EricEisaman is a series of demos of Essentia.js, an “Open-source C++ library for audio analysis and audio-based music information retrieval.”

~lsdsng-to-html by @aga68k converts lsdj to other formats. It got a nice shoutout from someone who made a cool visualizer with it!

~relative-fiction by @filipnest uses the Foursquare and OpenWeatherMap APIs to let you create dynamic stories relative to where your reader is, which is really fascinating!

~trail-talented-angelfish by @AKST is an app that renders sheet music, a great starter for your future music apps!

~hushed-airy-dragonfly by @aidelojejoshua counts how many vowels are in a string. May or may not be related, but the Bee Movie script has 14438 vowels.

~srcsnap by @LingDong- connects screenshots with a particular project revision, a tool for and by generative artists.

~discover-music by @tomthecollins is a music discovery tool made through research at University of York.

~momentous-dusty-alloy by @hitode909 was a widely shared page that let viewers watch the different stages of the Fuji Rock Festival in parallel.

The first Glitch app to ever go viral, ~f1-start by @jakearchibald, had another wave of shares on Twitter as people there tried to see who has the best reflexes.

~caninclude by @CyberLight has been around for awhile but it’s worth sharing again for newer folks. It’s a widely cited tool for seeing if you can put a given HTML element inside another one. Use it next time you even think of putting a div in a button!

~stellenbosch-heritage-tree-storymap by @wihan is a storytelling map of “exceptional” trees in Stellenbosch.

Some clocks: ~qr-clock by @pi43r is a QR code, and ~css-binary-clock by @christianp is a great starter for a binary clock or timer!

~marbled-paper by @nonphoto is a simulator we never knew we needed but have definitely been missing: marbling paper virtually!

~days-since-last-uk-politician-resigned by @leighghunt was widely shared as UK politicians were resigning in droves recently.

~3dep by @giswqs is a map that compares the tiles available in the USGS 3DEP LidarExplorer versus Google’s Earth Engine.

~uk-nutrition-label by @acme is an app that generates simplified nutritional information about packaged food in the United Kingdom.

~spring-tricolor-shop by @aidelojejoshua is a character counter—very useful for prototyping tweets or other strings with a character max! They also made this anime quote generator, ~shell-golden-operation.

~polarized-faint-asparagus by @higashi.kota used Flubber for a smooth as butter animation.

~resonance-choir by @tomthecollins and @jemily was an installation at Web Audio Conf that happened last week. It uses the Resonance Audio SDK to let listeners immerse themself as if they were in the venue!

~arithmos by @Kiritchell is a number guessing game

~nothcom by @jooooooon is a puzzle game inspired by the iconic riddle, notpron.

~motley-intelligent-author is a cute and satisfying little app made by @cora+glitch. Remix to edit the table content and flip all the things in your life that need a good flipping!

~faint-infrequent-breeze by @caesiumtea is an incremental game

~netronics-mapmaker by @Osmose is a prototype tilemap editor for people building custom BBS servers in the game Last Call BBS

~bitter-snowy-catboat is an interactive fiction app and @tenderblackfeelings’s first HTML game! Great work! 

In case you missed it, we also profiled design researcher and creator Elvia Vasconcelos on the Glitch blog this month, so please check out our discussion with her on the politics of participation, and honestly like a hundred other intriguing things! As always, if you have Glitch projects or playlists you built or love and want us to feature, either share them on the forum, tweet them to us @glitch or email community@glitch.com—we’d love to see your work in our next roundup!

The project featured in this post’s header image is ~500-breezy-cursors, another new classic by @adarosecannon. 

If we had to pick one word to describe July 2022 for the Glitch community it would be movement.

Last month on Glitch, the July 2022 edition

Have you ever been scrolling along the web and you see something that not only jumps out at you, but makes you realize you have to spend more time investigating this new discovery? That’s how we felt when we discovered Elvia Vasconcelos’ work on Glitch. She has created individual worlds of discovery through taking non-digital objects like sketchnote drawings, pottery, embroidery, and collage and sharing them with Glitch apps, in a way that combines the feelings of being in an art gallery or studio, or having a deep conversation with a trusted friend. It’s hard to articulate the richness of her work, so we reached out to Elvia and she agreed to an interview with Director of Community, Jenn Schiffer. 

Jenn: So I think to get started, I just want to know who you are and what is your daily discipline or job? What’s your story? 

Elvia: I’m always super interested in hearing about the work that I do, how does it land with people? How does it resonate, and also what connections people make. And I’m particularly interested in your experience because if you have this overview of the things that people are experimenting with in Glitch, I’m sure that you will see patterns or trends emerging, like how people are using this platform to work through their practices. That’s my personal curiosity. But I’ll tell you a little bit about who I am.

So my name is Elvia. I am a design researcher, which can mean nothing, but currently I’m doing a PhD at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Department of Industrial Design. And my research is about collaborative methods in design research. Practically I’m interested in how people do things together. Before I started my PhD, I worked for eleven years in the UK as a user researcher, and I specialized in digital government services. My role was essentially to work with the teams that were creating digital services, like a website where you could fill in your taxes or apply for a passport, renew your things. And my role was to bring civil society into these processes. I acted as a bridge. So my research is about how you bring people into structures, processes, and I’m specifically interested in the politics involved. So—who gets to participate in what way, and what kind of power/configurations exist in these places? 

The sketchnotes come in…and specifically, I think through Glitch. The way I’ve been using Glitch is to work through my research questions. I really struggle with writing and articulating myself with text or words, and language in general..and so it’s much easier to kind of draw things out and be like,“ Okay, I’m interested in this, this and that. And the connections are this.” I find it easier to have, almost like maps. 

A visual essay created by Elvia incorporating illustrations, handwriting, markdown, embroidery, and ceramics to explore behaviors around food.

And Glitch, for me, has allowed me to create…I’ve been calling them online essays, but it’s these complex maps of things that combine the sketches with text and links and stuff. It’s been really great to really use it as a surface to unpack things and see what comes out. 

That’s really cool. I think the thing that caught my eye, the one I saw originally was where you were recreating your sketchnotes with embroidery and ceramic. The first thing I saw was a ceramic. I was like, “Oh, this is really cool.” But that’s further ahead of the process. So I want to think back to sketchnotes in general, what brought you into that world? You talked a bit about what purpose sketchnotes have served in your work. Have you been creating them awhile, or is this something in your recent PhD work that you’re exploring?

Essentially they are visual notes that combine simple drawings with text and they are different from drawing or illustration because they are mostly about doing something live and they’re very much working processes. I started doing sketchnoting in 2011, I think—so eleven years ago. And because sketchnoting has a kind of root in the UX industry, so you can see lots of people doing graphic recording in conferences. And so the reason I started sketchnoting was because at the time I had finished a master’s degree in Digital Arts and I was trying to get a job as a user researcher. In London there’s associations and conferences and events every single day. And one of the events that I started going to was the User Experience Professional Association, it’s a volunteer-run association and they do these monthly events. Everyone can come and there’s always someone sharing their skills. And after going to a few of those sessions, I thought, I really want to get involved. But I didn’t feel confident to have a voice, for example, on Twitter. I just felt I wanted to do something, but I felt really shy. So I reached out to the volunteer person and I was like, “Okay, here’s my portfolio. How can I help?” And they were like, “Well, you can sketch the event.” I was like, “Sure, I’ll do that”. And I walked out of the meeting and I had to Google what sketchnoting was because I had no clue. 

Then I just started. Every month I went to their events and I started doing the sketches. At first it took me a long time, and then I started going to all the events I could find and sketchnoting everything: podcasts, lectures, online, and for, I would say, a good three years, I sketchnoted like every week. Then I started doing live conferences and becoming more confident, like sharing it on Twitter and stuff. Then I started slowly doing it a bit more professionally and doing it at work. So sketchnoting the meetings that I was in, and then I started using it as a tool with the teams that I was working with. Then I started doing it live on big walls and it built up more in a kind of commercial sense.

Have you ever been scrolling along the web and you see something that not only jumps out at you, but makes you realize you have to spend more time investigating this new discovery? That’s how we felt when we discovered Elvia Vasconcelos’ work on Glitch.