Suspicious Computer

What would you find on an old computer in a world where the internet can no longer be trusted? Switch it on and piece together the story from the files someone left behind. This was designed for desktop.

Open the website (opens in a new tab)
The Anti Report magazine on a green CRT display with handwritten sticky notes below

Early ideas

monochrome screen archive, ASCII illustrations, handwritten sticky notes, a logo, looking in the source code for a clue.

why would someone keep this information offline in the first place?

Notebook page with ideas for monochrome screens, ASCII images and handwritten sticky notes

An offline world

a timeline in which AI takes over the internet, attempts to restart it fail, neighbourhood networks begin to form - people still use computers and pass sensitive information around on physical media.

I tried to first make a sensible and interesting world to put my project into.

Handwritten timeline from the internet takeover to the formation of neighbourhood networks
Handwritten notes on offline computers, physical communication and an insecure internet

First drafts

Layered drawing of a curved CRT frame open in Pixelmator
Green Anti Report magazine displayed inside a flat cream monitor frame

Familiarity wins

I knew how to use Blender which made it the quickest and best option for me, which turned out to give me great results too.

Untextured monitor case with camera and lights in the Blender viewport
Close-up of the beige monitor case above its Blender material nodes

Rendered details

I rendered out individual (interactive) elements so they would fit the aesthetic while being independent from the frame.

Close-up of the small ON/OFF switch on the Blender monitor model
A glowing indicator light on the lower corner of the monitor case in Blender
A square SAM badge rendered against the beige plastic case

Scanline Emulation

I stretched a noise texture horizontally in Blender to get thin streaks, then rendered them as a short loop. Perhaps unoptimal, but at the time this was the best approach for me and worked great.

Thin streaks across a dark screen above the Blender shader nodes that produce them

Lean and tidy

I kept the code simple and took care to make the assets relatively small. The whole project came out under 1MB in the end.

Project file tree showing the linked HTML pages, shared stylesheet and asset folders
The finished image assets grouped under a 350 KB bracket