Designed and built to support a research project by Dr Ola Michalec, this website includes an online version of the Oblique Manoeuvres card game, a tool for innovators designed to break creative blocks and encourage lateral thinking.
It was inspired by a similar card game called “Oblique strategies” designed by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, with Ola’s edition adapting the original intent to the world of Research & Development.
A lightweight, interactive website with a small energy footprint
From the inception of the project, Ola wanted to replicate the physical card game, whilst keeping the energy footprint of the website as low as possible.
How I achieved a low-impact website design and build
To make this possible, I decided the website should be static. This meant using plain HTML, CSS and limited JavaScript. No dynamic CMS included. Cloudflare Pages was chosen to host the website for a number of reasons. Firstly because it includes their renewably powered and globally distributed CDN for free. Secondly they offer high levels of caching, and as a bonus, AI bot blocking. All of which helps to improve the energy and carbon impact of the website.
Creating the interactive card game
One challenge of creating light weight websites is handling data, for instance a growing list of cards in a game. For this website, instead of using a CMS tool like WordPress, I decided to utilise something really lightweight. JSON.
JSON provides a simple, compressible data store that can easily be queried with JavaScript, in effect creating a miniature database. Randomly selecting a card from the database on user interaction replicates the way the card game would play in the physical world.