"web joy" — the joy you experience when visiting a website with joyful content and/or have a joyful experience (as a user) on a website, or the joy of creating such a website.

During the beyond tellerand conference this past week, someone mentioned “responsive web design” and having just completed IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf, the thought popped in my head that joyful web design should be a named thing, since many of us spent the weekend at IndieWebCamp doing just that.

I mentioned it to @jamesg.blog at a break between talks, we discussed it a bit and agreed that joy is a good motivator, and as creatives we both like creating things that are joyful to experience, and ideally joyful to create.

James blogged it before I got around to it: https://jamesg.blog/2026/05/01/joyful-web-design

That and a zoom chat today was inspiration to name that specific joyful experience “web joy”.

It’s a nod to “moon joy”, a mere weeks old phrase many have heard and been inspired by, coined by Mission Control science officer Angela Garcia, and transmitted (spoken) by CAPCOM on shift, Jacki Mahaffey, in reply to the Artemis II astronauts on mission (as noted in a NASA AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/nasa/comments/1stjt7m/comment/ohw9g9l/). You can hear the “Copy, moon joy.” expression in context at the start of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHUvedAssyE

Much thanks to James for his encouragement to blog “web joy”.

#webjoy #btConf #beyondTellerrand #webDesign #IndieWebCamp #indieweb