Rafael Gonçalves

“Things are not always as they seem” is both the punchline and guiding principle of Softrock®. Designed in collaboration with Pedro Mata, the website explores a paradoxical sense of materiality through a series of soft‑body simulations: rocks falling, colliding, and deforming. On each visit, three simulations are randomly selected, generating a unique constellation of textures, colours, and movements. This variability mirrors Softrock’s catalogue of singular objects and reinforces the idea that every encounter with the website is unique. In 2025 with Pedro we designed a new beautiful website without this animation. Even the things we most like are meant to go one day.

The website for Bruno Alves de Almeida, designed by And Atelier, opens with a generative, slideshow‑like narrative. Images and videos from Bruno’s work are grouped, randomised, and rearranged in both sequence and layout, producing unexpected juxtapositions on each visit. The index page brings together projects, writings, and institutions, visually connecting between them and to their year of production. This structure emphasises the interdisciplinary and contemporary nature of Bruno’s practice, allowing visitors to navigate not through linear categorisation but through temporal and relational associations.

Daniela Carneiro Lino’s practice moves between art, yoga, and Vedic astrology, grounded in contemplation and observation as methods for understanding the world. The website was conceived around the visual concept of alignment. On entry, images are loosely and randomly distributed across the screen, creating a dispersed and intuitive first encounter. As the user navigates deeper into individual projects, two central axes—horizontal and vertical—gradually organise the composition. This shift introduces focus and symmetry, guiding attention toward the centre of the screen and, by extension, toward a moment of introspection.

Creme Climbing is a design and manufacturing project for climbing holds in Porto. Designed together with Miguel Mesquita and with photographs by João Monteiro, this website presents the first collection of holds, positioning them in a space between athletic performance and aesthetic expression. Dual‑texture holds are shown in two colour sets, and the website choreographs photographs as movements on a climbing wall.

All of these threads come together quite naturally in the website for Fala Atelier, designed by And Atelier. The project explores the idea of an archipelago, where each work exists as an island within a larger shared vision. With over 8,000 uploaded objects—photographs, drawings, plans, collages—the site breaks away from conventional project pages and instead produces constantly shifting narratives. Pages are calculated through image priorities, project hierarchies, lenses, and tropes, allowing different readings of the practice to emerge. Photographers, collaborators, lenses, and tropes each have their own pages, collecting objects that are, in the website’s own words, “gloriously repeating.”

Working on the Porto Design Biennale marked a shift from individual authorship toward large-scale institutional collaboration. As a designer/developer in 2019 and later as New Media Director in 2021, I had to think of these websites as spaces where multiple voices, programmes, and temporalities had to coexist. With art direction by Inês Nepomuceno in 2019 and 1234 (Miguel Almeida, Irina Pereira, João Castro, Serafim Mendes) in 2021, the challenge was not only to produce a single visual statement based on a curatorial approach, but also, to build a flexible system capable of accommodating events, partners, venues, and evolving content.

From an ongoing institutional platform, the work for Produktive Bildstörung moves toward a more time-bound narrative, stuck on the pandemic online format. Created to mark the 80th anniversary of Sigmar Polke and organised by the Anna Polke Foundation, this festival is documented through a website that adopts a scroll-based structure and unfolds the festival in distinct sections. Texts and videos from conferences and initiatives are revealed gradually, allowing the website to function both as documentation and as a contemporary homage to Polke’s practice. The visual Identity is by the wonderful Thomas Spallek.

The project for CEAU at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto introduces a more infrastructural dimension to institutional communication. Alongside a visual redesign by Non-verbal Club, the website integrates features to support research analysis and dissemination. By connecting directly to the national research platform Ciência Vitae, the system automatically collects curricula and outputs from all researchers, making them publicly accessible through lists and statistics. Here, the website acts less as representation and more as an operational tool for institutional communication and research practice.

Questions around education, space, and institutional frameworks are also present in Classroom, a Teenage View, an exhibition curated by Joaquim Moreno and hosted across CCB, arc en rêve, and Z33. With visual identity by Thomas Spallek, this website stores information about venues, symposiums, and publications into a single navigable structure. Rather than foregrounding spectacle, the interface supports reflection on how educational models are shaped by the spaces and institutions that host them.

These concerns culminate in the editorial project developed for the Portuguese Supreme Court, with the Art Direction by Item Zero. A Revista brings together academics, judges, magistrates, and cultural authors around themes of law, citizenship, and human rights. The website’s layout draws from the neoclassical architecture of Portuguese courts: triangular structures inform headers and titles, while the composition of text and footers echoes the logic of the classical column. In this context, institutional communication becomes a matter of translating authority, history, and public responsibility into a minimal and contemporary composition.

Working once again within the framework of a large cultural institution, the Lisbon Architecture Triennale 2025 website was one of the most rewarding projects I was part of. Designed and developed around the theme How Heavy is a City?, the project approaches the web by questioning How heavy is a Website?. Guided by perma-computing principles, the platform deliberately reduces computational sophistication and resource consumption, questioning the environmental and material weight of digital infrastructures. Based on The Royal Studio’s visual identity and art direction for the 7th edition, the design favours essential interactions, vertical rhythmic structures, and open-source typographic systems. The website positions itself as a digital artefact that critically reflects on architecture’s relationship with matter, energy, and the systems that we produce as society.

Developed in the context of Porto Design Biennale 2021 and exhibited at Casa do Design (another website I've designed 😏), The Archive of Vibrant Matter extends the exhibition into a living digital repository. Participants are invited to submit entries—forms of “matter”—carefully described through predefined fields and categories. Each submission undergoes validation and editing by the curatorial team, balancing openness with rigour. The website becomes a structured yet expandable environment where classification is not neutral but a shared curatorial act.

Where Vibrant Matter focuses on contemporary contributions, An Archaeology of Utopia turns toward historical reconstruction. Designed by Miguel Almeida and Irina Pereira, the platform aggregates records from the SAAL process in Portugal. Information is exposed across listings, detailed entries, and interactive maps, allowing users to read projects spatially as well as textually. Each record contains data about location, technical teams, services, and neighbourhood contexts, that transforms archival research into a navigable public interface. Whenever there's the housing topic on the table, there's a voice in the back of my mind saying "Freeze the Rent! ✊"

Éden X is a compelling example of the power of participatory media. Created by Joana Pestana and Mariana Pestana, this more-than-human digital assembly brings together participants from various disciplines – including architecture, biology, design, and philosophy – to engage in discussions on ecological issues. Contributions such as text messages, proposals, replies, votes, and reactions are displayed on both a dedicated website (accessible globally) and a physical installation with TV screens (accessible locally). This platform approach ensures broad accessibility, fostering reflection and dialogue for anyone with an internet connection. The installation we created on this project made me apply to a PhD at University of Coimbra to explore the relationship between websites, participation and public space.

Not necessarily an artwork in the browser, this website is part of a monograph of one of the most influential internet artists I know, Rafaël Rozendaal. The monograph, Color Code Communication, is an exhibition in Museum Folkwang featuring different artworks from the artist. Together with Thomas Spallek, I've develop a website that works as a guide for the exhibition featuring information from each work, the artist and an audio guide to follow from anywhere inside or outside the exhibition. The interactive and aesthetic aspects of the website place them in a grey zone that can be understood as design but also an extension of the artist work.

I also felt this section was short and I decided to put here instead of the first chapter 😇.

Para-scapes is a project from Luisa Tormenta, it reflects on "[…] the autonomy of machines as image creators through a generative digital painting created with screenshots […]" as written by Luisa. A series of cctv cameras where collected and an algorithm in WebGL superimposes them with a generative threshold and pixel processing function. The result is "[…] an infinite painting to be generated live on a website."

In Spite of all, we are still (2025), Linda Vilka approaches the gesture of “scratching” a surface as a way of unveiling the world and, ultimately, the self. Translating the façade of Palácio Iglésias into a layered digital environment, the website invites visitors to participate in a performative form of interactivity. Textures made by Linda are overlaped, reordered with each visit and gradually revealed through the user’s actions. What begins as an unsettling and dense accumulation of matter and meaning slowly gives way to moments of clarity. Perception here is presented as personal—though shareable, incidental—though situated, and fleeting—though attainable.

The work with Indonesian artist Eko Saputra turns toward uncovering histories. In Flavours that Have Been Forgotten, Eko reflects on the meanings and consequences of “discovery,” moving beyond colonial navigation narratives toward a more intimate search for belonging. Focusing on the often-overlooked Portuguese presence in the Indonesian archipelago during the sixteenth century, the website becomes a space of reconnection. Through echoes of people, places, and objects—including the once-coveted eastern spices that travelled across oceans—the project invites visitors not simply to learn about history, but to feel its absences, misplacements, and resonances.

The first parametric tool I ever built was actually for Porto Design Biennale 2019. I didn't know what Parametric Design was back then, I was just vibing and wanting to learn new things. Together with Inês Nepomuceno, we decided to explore the potential of expression using variable typefaces (that were becoming more popular at the time). I've designed and developed a webpage that randomly attributed a value to each letter creating an animation that could run infinitely, but also, be stopped, configured and exported in vector format at each step. This resulted in a dynamic visual identity with infinite combinations of logos with multiple outputs.

Prémio Paulo Cunha e Silva is one of the key contemporary art prizes in Porto, spanning performance, installation, painting, sculpture, and moving image. Working with Irina Pereira as Art Director, we wanted the visual identity to emerge from a dialogue with the computer rather than being fully predetermined. I developed a parametric tool that takes a black-and-white image as a starting point and generates organic, root-like forms that grow into the surrounding empty space. These forms can be adjusted in real time, allowing the identity to shift and adapt while still retaining a recognisable structure.

Both this projects will be featured in Slanted Digital Tools Edition 🙏

La Remedios is an audiovisual company based in Barcelona. Diogo Matos imagined a dynamic visual identity inspired by the camera tracking artefacts present on this kind of media. Different green colored elements construct the text with pre-defined parameters for accurate control of the generated version.

With the knowledge I've been gathering in Creative coding and Parametric Tools, I've decided to create short duration courses that can both introduce professionals and students to Creative Coding and Parametric Design with focus on creating tools for design practice.