Superfast! Interactive Book

Creative coding, front-end, book design

Superfast! Our Fatigued Body and Society is a book that examines speed, overdrive, and exhaustion within contemporary work and consumer culture through the synthesis of two found texts: “Superfast Jellyfish,” a song by the virtual band Gorillaz, and A Little History of Fatigue by sociologist Tom Melick. Placed in dialogue, these texts expose a dialectical tension between acceleration and burnout, stimulation and depletion. It is available in both printed and website form.

The project’s visual language is driven by generative typography, developed through original sketches coded in p5.js, where creative algorithms map and transform letterforms to balance legibility with poetic abstraction. Emphasizing horizontality and implied motion—drawing inspiration from the physical act of applying paint on canvas—the work interrogates the materiality of code-based visuals by blurring the boundary between digital and analog, reintroducing a tactile sensibility into computational design. While the book also exists in printed form, the web version leverages p5.js to enable real-time motion graphics and interaction. Through camera input, cursor movement, and responsive motion, readers are given agency to shape the book’s appearance, allowing the concept of exhaustion to unfold as an embodied, participatory experience.

Website walkthrough

Full spreads

Printed front cover (Left: final product; right: process book)

Printed back cover