A Club for Humans Should Not Look Like a Machine
Notes on designing Humanarium — paper, ink, and the colour of oxytocin.
When I was designing this page, every family of type on my mood boards carried a trace of something — a little publisher, a little history. I'm Çiğdem, and as I designed Humanarium — both as an in-person space and as a hub — I wanted to bring my own taste to it. I also know how careful you have to be about letting personal taste lead a brand; perhaps if I hadn't spent fifteen years running marketing, branding, and communications inside a serious finance company, I'd feel freer about it. But looking first at what your audience is actually looking for — wasn't that the very first thing we were taught? Luckily, this time I set out to build something genuinely human, and that gave my hand more room.
I wanted to write this design note on purpose. How science, people, and communication can sit together is something I have always questioned. If you'd like to share a suggestion or any feedback on this page or its design, I would honestly be glad to hear it.
— Çiğdem O.
Most things built in the machine age look like the machine age. Cool greys, a sans-serif borrowed from a thousand other dashboards, a gradient, a great deal of white space that reads less like calm than like a server room. I understand why — it signals competence, speed, the future, and I spent years helping companies like these. But when I began designing Humanarium, a club for humans, I knew the one and only thing it could not look like was a machine.
Design is not decoration. It is an argument you make before anyone has read a word. By the time a visitor reaches our first sentence, the page has already told them what we believe — about attention, about warmth, about whether the person on the other end matters. So the form had to carry the belief. If we are building a place to protect human connection, the surface itself has to feel human: made, warm, a little imperfect, the way a hand is.
Design is an argument you make before anyone has read a word.
If you like the specifics, here is the actual build — colours first, then type.
And one colour. This was the decision I cared about most. The accent of a club built on human connection should, I thought, be oxytocin — the hormone of touch and trust, the warmth you feel when someone you love walks into the room. There is only one problem: oxytocin is colourless. It is a small, clear peptide; it has no colour at all. I did not want to pretend otherwise, because the whole point of this place is to be honest — about machines, and about ourselves. So we did not colour the molecule. We coloured the feeling. We gave the warmth a colour — a soft, almost neon orange — and we let it behave like warmth: used rarely, never filling the room, always glowing faintly, breathing in and out behind the words like body heat, like a pulse.
Coloured the feeling.
There is a reason I kept coming back to oxytocin specifically. It is one of the neuropeptides involved in the very things this club is built around — touch, eye contact, trust, the rhythm of a real conversation. Research associates it with bonding, lower stress, and our ability to read and care for one another, and much of that response appears tied to being physically present in a way a screen does not reliably reproduce. That gap is the whole argument. If connection has a biology, then losing it is not only a feeling; it is something measurable, happening in the body. Humanarium begins there: treat being together as something real enough to study, and protecting human connection stops sounding sentimental and starts sounding necessary.
Even the portraits make the argument. Our faces sit in a warm black-and-white, and bloom into full colour the moment you reach toward them — a hover, the closest thing the web has to touch. Connection, made visible. Reach, and the person warms.