People look at art: An interview with Anton Repponen

The 2025 edition of Readymag Websites of the Year wrapped up last month, announcing 25 nominees and three winning projects. True to its visual identity, the award once again looked into what tends to hide at the edges of web design. Bold concepts, rule-free layouts, and experimental approaches to storytelling were the traits that led to the win.

This article opens a new interview series with the award winners. The first conversation guest is Anton Repponen, who received the Jury Choice recognition for his intimate and thought-provoking website, People Look at Art. This project explores the delicate moments people spent one-on-one with art across countries and galleries. 

Anton Repponen is a New York–based interaction designer with over 20 years of experience building products, digital experiences, brands, and fun, engaging things people love to use.

For now, the virtual floor is Anton’s. Read on for Repponen’s behind-the-scenes of the winning project, his inspiration sources, and a bit of musings on bravery in design.

Finding patterns in decade-old archives

It is one of those projects that wasn’t designed forward, but discovered backward—the structure only revealed itself in retrospect.

I always have a camera on me. It is a constant background process. In 2025, I finally stopped to look into my Lightroom library, going back to 2004. It’s something I never thought I’d find interesting, until I started noticing connections, similarities, and contradictions across years of photographs. Once that clicked, it opened up a flood of new directions, and suddenly I had more ideas than I could realistically make in a single year.

The process resulted in a series of thematic folders that were surprising even to me. I found I had been obsessively documenting isolation in crowded spaces, which became Alone in New York. I realized I had a massive collection of infrastructure like road signs, parking lots, and construction sites. That turned into Form & Field.

People Look at Art or Art Looks at People emerged from that same process of looking for patterns. I realized that whenever I enter a gallery or museum, I am instinctively drawn to the dialogue between the observer and the art.

Observing personal moments while protecting the intimacy 

Each time I visit a museum or a gallery, I look at the work. But it is just as interesting to see how other people react to what I just observed. Is their reaction the same? Is it the opposite? I will never know. But at least I managed to capture the unique moment when they undergo a personal emotional experience with an art piece that resonates with them, either for good or for bad.

I like that the people are captured from the back. We do not see their emotional expression. That meeting is quite personal, and we should leave that with them.

The shadow on the website is an abstract presence of me as a photographer. I am moving behind the subject, observing the art, and capturing that moment. I thought a lot about small elements to create a connection between the moment people experience the art and me capturing that moment. The shadow was the trick that connected it.

Actually, a few people texted me that they had a strong desire to visit a museum after seeing the website. I will take that as an achievement.

Finding inspiration in trying new tools

Besides observing life, a big source of inspiration for me is simply trying things and testing new tools, even when the outcome is rough. The point is not to nail it on the first attempt, it’s to see what the tool makes possible. In that process, I stumble into small discoveries, unexpected behaviors, and new combinations. Those moments often become the starting point for a design idea later on.

I’ve been using Readymag since it launched in 2013. For me, the value of Readymag is that it highlights a side of web design that doesn’t always fit into “best practices” checklists.

A lot of the nominated Readymag sites lean towards more creative, more expressive, and more experimental. I think that comes from Readymag itself, both in spirit and in the tool’s specifics. If you need a best practices website with a CMS and multiple languages, you probably won’t use Readymag for that. The tool naturally creates a niche space where designers and enthusiasts can experiment and try things out, and Websites of the Year tends to reflect that.

Manifesting through personal projects

The contemporary web is headed toward being predictable, safe, easy to build and update, and oriented for the short attention span. There are too many factors contributing to that, but listing them all will take a while. Luckily, among the boring and bland web, there has always been space to create something interesting, crazy, or personal.

I come from a generation of designers that started in the early 2000s. I often hear designers my age getting nostalgic about how experimental and crazy the web used to be. But nobody is stopping you from doing that today.

The technology now allows you to make even more interesting things than back in 2000. There is no design police stopping you from creating anything you want. A project becomes a statement when you stop trying to please everyone and just focus on a singular idea. It needs consistency. If you stay true to the internal logic of the idea, it naturally develops a strong voice.

I really appreciate it when people spend time on personal projects that have nothing to do with commercial work. Most designers have deep, specific interests outside of their work, yet they rarely use their professional skills to manifest them. We have the ability to build entire digital worlds for our interests. When I see a designer take a niche, personal observation, and build a dedicated, structural home for it on the web—that is what I pay attention to.

Stay tuned—articles with two more Readymag Websites of the Year 2025 winners are coming soon.