IndieWeb is Metal
Published by Nick atDepending on how tired I am on Wednesday evening, how easily I can get my kid to bed, and whether I have a work meeting (cameras off, thankfully) at 7:00 am the next day, I am an infrequent presence at the virtual Home Brew Website Club.
This meetup happens ever other Wednesday at 6pm in the U.S. Pacific time zone, and is an official IndieWeb.org event. The first one of these I attended was in 2021, and I’ve since made a number of internet pals through these informal settings and sprawling community. There are other virtual and in-person events happening all the time, and even if you can’t make it to an event, there are still ways of participating in the IndieWeb movement. I subscribe to the generous, inclusive Jeremy Keith definition of indie web: that if you have your own website, you are a participant in this movement.
Anyway, at a Home Brew Website Club meeting in October last year, we were discussing the various IndieWeb swag available, and Benji of benji.dog fame mentioned he would buy and wear an IndieWeb shirt if instead of the official logo it was rendered as a heavy metal logo, with questionable legibility, rendered in tangled, thorny tendrils. As a trained graphic designer, when you hear someone say something should be a tee shirt, you get ideas of how to make such a thing happen.
I’m happy to announce you can now buy the unofficial IndieWeb heavy metal shirt or tote bag from CottonBureau.com. The sales of these print-on-demand products ($2 from each shirt and tote) will make their way to a donation to IndieWeb.org’s Open Collective. The shirts come in a couple variants: a black logo on graphite (my personal fave), natural, or purple, as well as a purple logo on black shirt variant. The tote bags are black on natural and purple on black, with the graphic printed as big as Cotton Bureau will allow us to print it. These are pretty big tote bags too: 15 inches by 16 inches, great for stuff like groceries and vinyl records.
The design itself was a commission, as my heavy metal lettering skills are not nearly this sophisticated. I found Liam, a lettering artist who specializes in metal logos, on Fiverr. I’m still somewhat conflicted about using the Fiverr platform, but Liam’s portfolio demonstrated he could execute what I had in mind. We agreed on a price and I left him a generous tip too. So in late 2024, I had digital artwork, and uploaded my idea as a GitHub issue.
Benji subsequently printed up some stickers and as has been giving them away at IndieWeb events (and hopefully sticking them all over Minneapolis). But the shirts haven’t happened on the IndieWeb shop. This summer, I learned of the IndieWeb is Punk shirt and sticker and thought maybe there was a little more I could do with the artwork I commissioned. Liam did grant me ownership of this art, including permissions to print and sell stickers, tees and other merch to benefit IndieWeb.org. At the very least Benji and I would each order one. IndieWeb is punk, but also metal.
I’ve also been on a sticker kick lately, after quickly selling out of my Luddite stickers. So when I reordered my Luddite design, I thought I would give the glow-in-the-dark stickers a try. I sent a few to Benji already, and have them listed now in my ko-fi shop. Glow-in-the-dark is a bit more expensive to print on, so I’m selling these for $12 for a two-pack with $1 per sticker going to IndieWeb.org’s Open Collective. Also, if you sign up for my Chaos Club site membership ($1 a month or more) with a mailing address, I will send you all my stickers, including the glowing IndieWeb variant.
Printing stickers is not printing money, and I hope the official IndieWeb shop will eventually adopt these (and more) designs as their own. In the meantime, it is fun to get a physical product you want to see out in the real world.
Finally, Liam, the lettering artist also happens to do voiceover work and can record himself speaking in a demonic voice. So I hired him again to record a simple promo for IndieWeb.org:
Having your own website is powerful. Your content is yours. You are better connected. You are in control. Visit IndieWeb.org