Dark Skies Association
A brave new home for Molly Nilsson’s intergalactic enterprise, Dark Skies Association
1995
It was a real treat working with Molly to create this mysterious homage to the ‘old web’ of yore—a quasi-brutalist mixture of classical typographic drop-caps, linear border ornaments and condensed letter forms dancing cheek-to-cheek with proto-wingdings and CSS recreations of those once ubiquitous glossy pill buttons.
Riddle me this
Dark Skies Association is the ever-so-cryptic information and shopping division of Molly Nilsson’s enigmatic, musical machine. As such, its 2.0 website needed to meld a practical, functional core with a huge dollop of playful, aesthetic mystery to create something that felt like some secret corner of the 90s internet—yet one that didn’t feel ostensibly ironic or tacky.
Guided by Molly’s exquisite mood board, and her perennial approaches to palette and typography, we created a site where each page would follow a unique approach, but—unlike many of its Geocities peers!—would also sit together under a strong visual umbrella, creating a singular, almost brand-like, identity, influenced as much by classical typographic ornaments as much as old web design traits.
We also didn’t want this playful nature to be solely enjoyed by its users, so we crammed the backend with the capacity for Molly to adorn every post and page with vectorised versions of early-wingding style icons in bright red, canary yellow, royal blue or neon green.
