Design philosophy

There are plenty of out-of-the-box website templates today that are sleeker and more polished than what has become cassiebaby.com. But as I searched for the right look for my whimsically named astrology venture, those templates all started to blur together. They felt, honestly, too nice. Not that I don’t deserve nice things—I just don’t want those types of nice things.

At the same time, I’m a bit of a neat freak, so full-on zine-style cut-and-paste chaos was also out—it's an aesthetic I admire (and even envy) in others, but one I've learned that I just can’t live with. Instead, I wanted to lean into an under-designed feel—something that borrows from a scrappier, more DIY ethos while still feeling tidy, organized, and unmistakably Cassie.

I came of digital age in the late ’90s and early 2000s, back when personal websites were actually personal. Think: hand-coded HTML, maybe a little bit of PHP, guestbooks, blinking text (because we could), and an endless sea of 88x31 buttons. Websites back then weren’t just made—they were curated, more like zines than corporate landing pages. That era shaped my love for the internet as a place of creativity, not just commerce.

Now, as an out trans woman who finds it very hard to blend in anywhere—and is mostly okay with that—I’ve tried to embrace my inescapable individuality here. I am who I am, in person and digitally. The backbone of this site? The Web 1.0 workhorse Verdana, handling 99% of the copy like it’s still 1997 and just as legible against white as it ever was IMO. And my logo? Adobe's Times New Roman knock off, Adobe Text Pro, with fucked up kerning.

Is it modern? No. Is it me? Absolutely.

Inspirations and queer typography

One of my astrological heroes, Alice Sparkly Kat, uses Times New Roman so very effectively and beautifully in their digital aesthetic. A typeface that once felt like a default setting—one I used to churn out hundreds of thousands of words in grad school—has been reclaimed in my mind as distinctly theirs.

If this niche section of queerdom interests you, I also recommend checking out this excellent 2024 essay by Paul Soulellis, "What is queer typography?", as well as the story behind the typeface Queering by designer Adam Naccarato. These were a few of the people that inspired me to give myself permission to approach this site design more intentionally.

I haven't actually incorporated any 31x88 gifs into this site (yet?) but I have to call out the amazing creative work still being done in this once thriving digital currency. These tiny banners were the original badges of internet identity—little slices of personality, affiliation, and aesthetic rebellion. And I particularly enjoy this queer-forward collection of buttons from Yesterweb, as well as these from agender developer beeps.

Tools

Of course, despite all that, I’m not actually hand-coding this site in Notepad or uploading pages onto an FTP server via dial-up. Nostalgia is fun, but I'd much rather be doing readings for clients than being a full-time webmaster. And so, in the interest of digital transparency, here’s a list of the digital tools and services I use to make this site—and my practice—possible:

• Framer (website/hosting)

• Retool (custom CRM/database/automation)

• Loops.so (email automation/newsletter)

• Stripe (payments/subscriptions)

• Font Awesome (various icons)

• Coolors.co (color palette generator)

For my pre-recorded video readings, I use:

• Descript (video recording, editing, delivery and session transcription)