McCoy & Co - Personal Project - The Mushroom Farmer

Project Overview

Client:

Personal Project

Industry:

Art

URL:

Project Goal:

To craft an interface that challenges the rigid templates dominating modern web design. This site serves as both a personal experiment and a creative playground—allowing me to explore more poetic, intuitive, and strange digital experiences that don’t rely on corporate-safe grids or standardised flows, and to induldge my hobby of taking photographs of mushrooms and fungi.

Background:

Since the late 1990s, I've been immersed in the world of web design—starting in the early days of Flash, tables, and dial-up. While much of my professional work has focused on robust, scalable, and commercial digital systems, I’ve always carved out space in personal projects to indulge my more experimental instincts.

The Mushroom Farmer is one of those spaces. A place to test ideas, break rules, and see what happens when interfaces are built like interactive dreams rather than linear funnels.

All the content photography is my own taken from all over the world and rather than take the scientific apprach to naming each photo is named in teh stype of a 18th centry peasant.

Our Approach

Design Philosophy

Rather than conforming to UX trends and conversion-optimised best practices, The Mushroom Farmer explores mood, texture, and symbolism. It invites slowness and wonder.

Key design principles:

Intuition over instruction: Users are guided by curiosity rather than prompts.
Non-linear navigation: Pages loop, drift, and echo—mirroring natural growth cycles.
Analogue aesthetic: Imagery and layout draw inspiration from spores, randomness, and chance.

This isn't a site built for quick sales or SEO dominance—it's an interface as art object, and a sandbox for evolving thought.

Technical Approach

The site blends simple HTML/CSS foundations with custom JavaScript components and lo-fi image assets. It is intentionally light in framework and heavy in intention.

Custom scripting for animated transitions and layered interactivity
Uncommon layout logic including floating UI, hidden panels, and modular loops
adaptive behaviour that shifts subtly depending on device type and screen ratio

This is not about performance in the traditional sense—it's about creating an emotional texture online.

Reflections

The Mushroom Farmer reminds me of why I fell in love with the web in the first place: its potential to be weird, alive, and generative.

It's a personal ritual more than a product. And it continues to grow underground.

Showcase