Nocturna Design | Product & Brand Design

Overview

I grew up on the old internet. AIM buddy icons, MySpace profiles that played music at you, guestbooks, visitor counters. The early 2000's web was chaotic and half the profiles were unreadable. But it had a certain type of charm that's sadly missing from modern social media, the ability to make a profile that was truly a reflection of you.

Haunted Social is a speculative concept meant to address this. What would a social platform look like if it combined the collecting utility of Pinterest, the customizability and sense of place found on Myspace and Tumblr, ditched the addictive endless scroll, but left just enough structure in place to ensure accessibility?

Challenge

In order to break away from the addictive patterns of modern social media, the defining decisions in this project were mostly refusals. Every pattern I would normally reach for in a modern social product; i.e. badge count, algorithmic feed, endless cross, exist to keep people locked in. I had to find a way to reject all of these while still making the app worthwhile to engage in.

The second problem was customization. The existence of MySpace and Tumblr proved people want to express themselves, and there's a very good reason these have seen a recent resurgence. But I've also seen the unreadable chaos that ensues when you give people complete freedom over their profile. I wanted the personality without the chaos, which meant deciding exactly how much of a profile its owner gets to touch.

Research

I starting by going back through the platforms that made the old internet profiles feel like a "place". Then I looked at what people actually do on modern platforms when nobody is pushing them. This actually lead me to Pinterest, which gave me the collecting model. Organizing your own taste is the whole activity, and it still has merit even when no one is watching. This helped me draw parallels to Tumblr and reminded me of the early reblog-era curation culture. Eventually I landed on the idea of a profile acting as a portrait of what someone likes rather than a log of what they did.

Process

After research, I knew curation would be the main focus of this application, so I skipped the usual starting point and wireframed the detailed collection page first. I drew on Pinterest again for the general structure, but the concept of "pins" felt too derivative. So I started thinking about the other ways people collect the things they like, and because I'm a huge fan of film photography and poloroids, I immediately thought of photographs. What if a collection felt a bit more like a scrappy journal full of snapshots?

Once the name came to me the aesthetic choices followed quickly. I gave every snapshot a slight randomized tilt so a wall of them never looks machine-aligned, and I found I liked the look of adding a bit of tape at the top of each one. The tape is what turned a grid into something that reads as hand-made.

I also spent time imagining my ideal user and what their collections might look like. Someone who grew up on the old internet, still keeps a corner of it in their taste. I wanted the demo to feel real, so I actually went and curated the demo content myself. Images, music, and quotes, gathered into collections I would actually keep, for a fictional user named ghostlight. It was a lot of fun, and ironically helped proved the value of the platform before a single line of it was coded. I lost hours to collecting things I liked, with nobody watching and no reason to do it beyond wanting to.

From there I moved to the profile page, and I worked through it as a set of questions. What would a user want to know about a collection before opening it? What would they want to know about the person? Answering those questions is what shaped the design.

The name Haunted Social came to me mid development. I was thinking about how old social media is "dead" but making its way back, almost like it is haunting us. I also thought about how people call the bars and places they like to frequent their "haunts," and how that is the exact feeling I wanted this platform to provoke. You genuinely enjoy spending time on the platform so much that you keep coming back, and keep visiting other profiles with similar interests and styles. Once the name landed, the ghost iconography, the copy voice, and the login screen all snapped into place.

Then I used Claude Code to execute. I built the whole thing as a real Next.js app, with Claude Code in the workflow from first layout to deployment. The demo is written like a tiny world with three users. You browse as ~moth, visiting ~ghostlight's profile.

Solution

Since the platform is only for demo purposes (I don't have the bandwidth to handle the legalities of shipping a real social media site solo) it is a deliberately serverless static site hosted on S3.

As far as the concept goes, the solution is a genuinely engaging platform where users can curate their own personal collections and share a part of themselves with others, on their own terms.

Outcome

Haunted Social is a self-initiated concept, and I am presenting it as exactly that. There is no user base and no engagement data, which is fitting for a platform whose success metric would never be engagement anyway.

If I took it further, I would measure it against its own philosophy. Do people return on their own schedule? Retention without compulsion is the goal.

open

Haunted Social

Role