A FFFFOUND! Retrospective — 15 Years Later
Digital eons ago, a small team of web designers created an endless digital art museum that helped change the way we interact with media forever.
Created in 2007 by Japanese based Art Director, Yosuke Abe and System Designer, Keita Kitamura, Ffffound (stylized as FFFFOUND!) was one of the first blogging sites created exclusively for sharing images. Upon its creation, it quickly became the place for artists and designers to view others’ work and gather inspiration.
I discovered Ffffound around 2008–2010 (I would have been around 16 years old). Being the early days of blogging, Ffffound was the first place I found (no pun intended) where I could view art anywhere and anytime. It was truly like visiting an art museum curated just for myself. Ffffound provided a source for art that always seemed relevant to my art preferences. There was an unwritten rule that the content on Ffffound would be on the weirder-side. No run-of-the-mill commercial art. It wasn’t a portfolio for users, meaning members weren’t sharing their own art. It was a special place to share art that was truly unique.
It’s hard to quickly encapsulate why Ffffound was so special without falling a bit further into the rabbit hole. This is what inspired me to take a look back at Ffffound and why it was so important to so many creatives.
With how ubiquitous digital image sharing is today, it’s hard to remember a time when sharing images online wasn’t possible. Without going too deep into the history of digital image sharing, in the early 2000's sharing images online was next to impossible unless you built and hosted your own website. Sites like Flickr, launched in 2004, were created to share your own images but none were built to share other people’s images. This is where Ffffound, found its place.
Both Ffffound and Tumblr were created in 2007. Tumblr also allowed users to share other people’s photos but was intended to work as a personal blogging site. On the other hand, Ffffound’s pages were filled with uploads from all of its approved users at once.
Ffffound also chose to rely exclusively on images. Ffffound had almost no text — no conversation, no comment sections. Posts were accompanied only with a link to where the image was sourced.
Images posted to Ffffound primarily fell into two categories, photography or graphic design but extended to mediums like architecture, interior design, new media, fashion and more. In 2008, a spokesperson for the company said by the end of its second year, the site hosted over 500,000 images (source).
Under (or beside — depending on page view) each image were accompanying images that Ffffound’s algorithm thought the user would enjoy, creating an endless, constantly updating, museum of curated images (similar to Amazon’s “people who liked this also liked…” feature).
While writing this, I asked many of my designer/creative friends if they had ever used Ffffound and to my surprise, almost none had. Maybe I have the wrong friends.
One who did, Jared Erickson (founder of Brother Moto) said
“It was my source of inspiration and felt like the underground alt pre Pinterest. I loved seeing what was posted daily and would often gather inspiration from it.”
The site’s logo was ugly.
This logo is a “fuck you” to every rule of design. A bathroom stall doodle — depicting a stylized shadow of a person picking something off the ground. Maybe one of the most non-logo, logos of all time. A jagged silhouette paired with type that looks like it was done by a 4 year old with chalk.
Purposeful or not, the logo contrasts the site’s extreme simplicity in a perfect way. Although the site’s design was minimal, the content on the site always felt like it couldn’t be found anywhere else — it was weird and “rule breaking”; just like the site’s logo.
I want to believe if it is still active today, the logo would remain the same. A jagged and complex silhouette in a sea of minimal logos.
The Site
From a UI design standpoint, Ffffound was barebones. As mentioned before, the site was uniquely simple, a textbook example of the proverb, “Less is more”.
The site’s layout consisted of two main parts: the sidebar (left side) and the content.
The Sidebar consisted of a few necessary links…
- “Top” which simply brought users to the most recent post.
- A “Sign In” option — useless for most site visitors (more on this later).
- A “Screensaver” link which allowed people to set their computer’s screensaver as an endless stream of FFFFOUND! posts.
- “iPhone” which was effectively a mobile browser version of the site, packed into an iPhone app (launched September 2009).
- The iconic strikethrough “Register” link. Clicking this link would trigger a pop-up with the message “FFFFOUND! is an invitation-based service.” (again, more on this later).
Below these links was a list of “Recent Active Users” and their post count.
The sidebar’s simplicity forced users to fall deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole of art without being distracted. Even if you tried, you couldn’t get lost in sign-in pages, comments, etc. It was just the art — without disturbance. The only place to go from one piece of art was to the next.
The Appeal of Exclusion
Commonplace today, Ffffound was my first experience with “invitation only” online communities. Account registration to Ffffound was strictly by invitation — hints the strikethrough “Register” link in the sidebar mentioned above. Users without accounts could view posts but not post their own. This allowed for self-moderation and avoided the site becoming too large to organize and manage
This moderation by the creators, deliberate or not, also had the added side-effect of exclusivity. Accounts giving users the ability to post were not handed out frequently. I don’t know how people were invited to create accounts or how many accounts in total were made.
I never received my invitation. I don’t know anyone who had an actual account on the site. In fact, founder of WeHeartIt, Fabio Giolito, stated he created the popular Ffffound alternative due to the fact that he never received his invitation.
‘’As a designer, I keep an inspiration folder on my computer where I throw all the cool images and links I find,’’ said Giolito. ‘’I created the site to organize things that I like. People liked it, so I opened it to everyone.’’
Ffffound remained invite-only for its entire 10 year life.
NSFFFFW (NSFW)
It wouldn’t be Ffffound without the nudity. I don’t have much to say about this other than that it was so prevalent on the site that it has to be noted. The site had a lot of nudity tucked between its typical art posts. I’ve read recent comments online that claim toward the end of Ffffound it seemed like a large majority of the site’s posts were NSFW in nature.
Noteworthy: Toward the end of 2018, Tumblr instated new guidelines which would remove all “sensitive content” including “NSFW” content. It’s estimated that the site’s traffic decreased by almost 20%.
Maybe one could make the argument that Ffffound was male driven or that the loose posting guidelines that allowed nudity also allowed the site to maintain a punk, “anything goes”, culture. I’ll leave this for someone else to speculate.
Rest In Peace
In April 2017 it was announced that the site would be shutting down via a tweet by Yugo Nakamura.
Today, if you visit the site, all that’s left of Ffffound is a static digital tombstone — the polar opposite of its once endless gallery. Posthumously displaying its decade of building community and inspiration.
After the closure of the site in May of 2017, dozens of similar sites were created to try to take its place but no others were able to recapture the raw, punk, aesthetic Ffffound was able to cultivate and maintain.
People are still wondering what happened to Ffffound. Googling “What happened to Ffffound?” will result in hundreds of people looking for answers on why the site closed.
In Memoriam
Ffffound is remembered by countless inspired creatives. As the trigger that pulled artists out of their creative blocks. The match that lit the spark of endless projects.
Ffffound was the creative hivemind of the time for creatives - all working in unison to create one of the first never ending digital galleries. Without Ffffound we would likely have no Pinterest, no Are.na, no behance or Dribbble.
If you visited Ffffound with the intent of finding something specific, you were in the wrong place. It was never about a destination but about falling deeper and deeper into a creative hole.
Ffffound felt punk rock yet minimal. Indie yet worldwide. The site created community without dialog and provided artists with inspiration and motivation for a decade.
As my thank you to the endless inspiration during my formative creative years, here is my tribute to FFFFOUND!
FFFFOUND Tribute Tee from NEVERTHERE is now available for pre-order.
Thanks for reading my first ever Medium post! I’m not much of a writer but this has been a fun project. I probably spent far too much time on this.
While writing this blog I was in contact with Ffffound’s creators. I asked them various questions about the site, users, information on its closure and more. They declined to comment. If they see this, I would still love to chat!I’d love to hear from anyone who used FFFFOUND! — How do you remember it? Did it impact you as much as it did me? What’s your favorite modern FFFFOUND! alternative?
