Abstract

This thesis asks whether a brand can generate real engagement without surrendering to an algorithm, and whether web design can recover the color, mystery, and sense of discovery it traded away as the internet corporatized. Daily internet use has risen every year on record, yet the spaces users inhabit have flattened into grey buttons and endless feeds. This question is answered through Zineth, a hybrid brand universe told across three coordinated forms: a Risograph-printed zine, a dense and layered website, and limited clothing drops. The zine operates as a key. Codes printed in its pages unlock gated areas of the site and the ability to purchase merchandise, while visitors without one must earn entry through games and puzzles. I define this inverted structure, in which a physical object drives the digital experience, as anti-algorithmic engagement. The website rejects the standard webshop format in favor of what I call impressionist web design, an exploratory interface rendered in CRT distortion and bright Riso color, seeded with easter eggs, point-and-click game sequences, and a first-person raycaster engine housing galleries and an arcade. Its visual language draws on early internet culture, Risograph printmaking, atomic-age logotypes, and the cyber-utopian optimism of the late 1990s. The work confirms three arguments. Anti-algorithmic engagement is a replicable strategy other brands can adapt. The early web’s design languages can be modernized into functional, expressive interfaces rather than nostalgia pastiche. And the iterative AI-assisted pipeline documented here shows a single designer building at a scale once reserved for full studios, a promise that mirrors what the internet itself offered in 1996. The sanitized interface dominating contemporary user experience is a design choice, and refusing that choice can itself become a brand value. Zineth proposes lingering as the measure of a brand’s success.

Publication Date

8-14-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Student Type

Graduate

Degree Name

Visual Communication Design (MFA)

Department, Program, or Center

Visual Communications Studies

College

College of Art and Design

Advisor

Dan DeLuna

Advisor/Committee Member

Adam Smith

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

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