What if there was a Yellow Pages but for the internet (and it wasn’t only useful as a door stop?) The Internet Phone Book is a new book created by Rotterdam-based internet explorers Elliott Cost and Kristoffer Tjalve, intended to be used as a directory of people who are interested in the “web as a medium and material”. Sometimes, the digital duo call this the “Poetic Web”, referring to the suggestive and open-ended ways that poetry works compared with more straightforward non-fiction. “Elliott and I have been part of this scene for the past five years, and while it feels that more and more people are joining the conversation, it can still be a challenge to find each other, so we made an open call and asked people to submit their websites for a physical directory,” says Kristoffer. As a balm to the growing discord between individuals on the internet, Internet Phone Book offers a chord of communion.
After more than 800 website creators submitted their sites, Kristoffer and Elliott found it hard to not feel optimistic about the internet when interacting with the web in experimental, personal, weird and poetic ways on a daily basis. The aesthetic of the book follows this warmth – a lovely, analogue yellow and a simple typeface that refers back to The Whole Earth Catalog, Mollie Katzen’s cookbooks, classic 90s phone books and train timetables inspired by Nederlandse Spoorwegen and Deutsche Bahn colour schemes.
Designed by Elliott, the book weaves a handmade style that evokes the Utopian Scholastic aesthetic defined by the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute, a look and feel of the early internet in the time where most media was still physical. “Elliott designed the book using HTML and CSS, and was sent to the printer using Paged.JS and CTRL+P. Basically, we worked on it on Github as any other website. I think this gives the book a specific feeling of something that is both a website and book, and neither,” shares Kristoffer.