A website that behaves
like a forest.
The Arium is a living atlas of connected things — a nature publication where every specimen is a thread, and pulling one watches the world reorganize itself. This is how it was made, and why it had to feel alive.
Most nature writing online is a list of articles.Nature isn't a list.
A forest is a network — roots talking to fungi, predators tied to prey, one freeze setting off a chain that ends in a molecule that didn't exist that morning. I wanted a publication whose structure told that truth, not just its prose.
The standard CMS gives you categories, tags, and a reverse-chronological feed. It treats a beaver, a watershed, and the idea of emergence as three unrelated posts. The Arium refuses that. It's built as a catalog of specimens— organisms, systems, phenomena, and processes — held together by a constellation index where the connections are the point. Pull the sugar maple and you find freeze-thaw hydraulics; pull that and you're in cryobiology; pull that and you're somewhere you didn't expect to be. That's not a navigation gimmick. That's the thesis made into an interface.
“Each specimen is a thread. Pull one and watch the world reorganize itself.”
PAINWhat kept breaking
Science writing on the web fights two losing battles. It flattens connected systems into isolated posts, and it buries genuinely astonishing facts under generic blog chrome — the same stock layout whether you're reading about a slime mould solving a maze or a year-end roundup. The wonder leaks out. Worse, the format gives you no way to wander, and wandering is how curiosity actually works.
AIMWhat it had to do instead
Build a place where the architecture rewards the why-thinker — the reader who follows a thread sideways into something unrelated and delightful. Give each specimen a museum catalog number and a single arresting hook. Let the index be a constellation, not a sidebar. And hold a publishing standard high enough that one fully-built specimen could prove the entire model before the second one existed.
Four decisions that made it feel alive.
The catalog, not the feed
Every entry is a specimen with a classification (O / S / P / X) and a catalog number — O–001, X–002. The site reads as a collection on view, with states like published, in progress, and queued shown openly. The roadmap becomes part of the exhibit instead of a hidden backlog.
The constellation index
A force-directed D3 layout turns the index into a living map. Specimens cluster, connect, and recenter as you explore — the homepage performs the network the publication is about. Structure carries meaning before a single article is read.
One arresting hook per specimen
No entry earns its place without a sentence that stops you. “It freezes solid in winter — heart stopped, brain stopped — and resumes full function in spring. Not metaphorically. Literally.” The editorial bar is the design system. Wonder is a requirement, not a garnish.
A typographic system built for print logic
Fraunces, Instrument Serif, Inter Tight, JetBrains Mono — four typefaces with distinct roles, giving the catalog a printed, edited quality the web rarely allows itself. The design system is a constraint that makes every specimen feel like it belongs to the same collection, however different the subject.
36 specimens. Every one a thread, every thread connected.
The force-directed graph isn't decoration — it's the argument. The Sugar Maple sits at the center of five connections because that's true. The Beaver branches toward Watershed and Succession because that's how the world is organized. The index shows the shape of ecology before a reader clicks anything.
Two entries built to full depth — the model demonstrated end to end.
Rather than launch with thirty thin stubs, The Arium opened with a single specimen built to its full depth. The sugar maple was right: a tree most people think they understand, hiding physics most people have never heard. It anchors three published catalog entries at once. The beaver came next — not as a summary, but as a forensic examination, from tooth to continent. Both received fully interactive builds before either went live.
A freeze-thaw cryo-hydraulic pump that generates 200 kPa of pressure from nothing but temperature — and synthesizes a molecule that only exists when humans intervene.
from temperature alone
during sap reduction
cross-linked as threads
North America's second-largest rodent. First-largest landscape architect. Its dams create wetlands that outlast it by centuries.
beaver-built wetlands
after the builder departs
in the constellation
“A molecule that does not exist in nature. It forms during maple sap reduction — created by the act of human processing.”
That last fact is the whole project in miniature. Quebecol isn't in the tree; it's in what we doto the tree. The sugar maple entry doesn't just describe a plant — it follows a thread out of the organism, through a process, into a phenomenon that only humans cause. A reader arrives for a familiar tree and leaves having reorganized how they see the entire system. The beaver does the same, but from the land outward — from the animal's body to the continent it reshapes. That's the experience the architecture exists to produce, demonstrated end to end.
Built to stay nature-pure, fast, and edited.
The Arium is intentionally walled off from the rest of the studio's ecosystem — it stays purely nature-focused, with its own typographic voice and its own pace. Content lives in two formats: Teardowns, structural analyses of how something works, and Field Notes, the essays around them. The migration from a static Astro prototype to a full Next.js App Router build brought the D3 force graph, three-theme system, and command palette into a proper production architecture — without compromising the editorial feel.
A publication you explore, not a blog you scroll.
The Arium proves a thesis I care about as a designer: structure is editorial. When the architecture of a site embodies the truth of its subject, the reader feels it before they read a word. One fully-built specimen, a constellation that breathes, and a catalog of thirty-six threads waiting to be pulled.