In 2022, a group of Textile writers were invited to learn to code with HTML and CSS, the building blocks of the web. They enhanced their stories with colour, photos, and layout customisations to create a unique immersive experience for their article.

Learning the basics of web design has equipped these participants to enhance their narrative in future articles online, no matter where they are published. Just as print magazines rely on software like InDesign to lay out stories and make them come alive, the participants in this workshop have learned to influence the look & feel of their creations on the web.

— Sam Nabi, workshop coordinator

There’s one part in my story about meeting my grandfather that’s just a little description of the way I had interacted with him. In the piece I wrote: ‘In person, all I could do was give him a hug and sit in silence as everyone else around me had conversations in Amharic over tuj and kitfo.’ I used block-quote code and padded the quote with white space to emphasize the distance created by the language barrier.

— Meseret Abebe

My story is about space, and I wanted to literally use words and letters to describe what happens when you take away space or use space. There's a sentence in my piece that goes ‘do words need to breathe for you to understand them.’ For that sentence, I used code to adjust the position of the text and reduce space between letters to reflect the question I’m asking.

— Aashay Dalvi

The code actually helped me in a variety of ways. I used the blockquote feature to highlight the part about the transition from my childhood in Pakistan into my life in Canada. I used code to change the background color and embed a map inside my story.

— Seemab Zahra

When I first submitted the story to Textile, I didn't get to add an image or choose what the title and background would look like for publication. I have more power with a digital approach: I chose the background, I added an image, I formatted the title, I embedded a map and used a blockquote. It's a very empowering feeling for me to be able to manipulate code in HTML and CSS and just play with the story.

— Seemab Zahra

Using HTML and CSS allowed me to rethink how to present the story and how using different forms of coding allows a reader to engage with it in a more interactive manner.

— Aashay Dalvi

The story can be more of an immersive experience for the reader, though to be able to further build and show the world that I have envisioned also made it a lot more immersive for me as a writer. My story is based on real historic events and refers to people who have actually existed in history. Although it's a fictional take, the photographs I added are of real structures, homes, and people. It’s exciting as a writer to use code to bring the reader further into the world that you have been crafting in your mind.

— Zehra Nawab

I really see this as just the starting point. As I become more confident in using the tools that we were equipped with during these workshops, there's so much that I can continue to go deeper into. I was thinking that it would be so amazing to add videos of the Empress Market that I refer to in the story, or have the sounds of a marketplace in Karachi playing in the background as you read the piece. So yeah, it's exciting—the potential for the story to become meatier is something that the digital platform really offers.

— Zehra Nawab

Through these 6 weeks I found it exciting to discover a new way to play with visuals and texts that weren't already tied to existing formats. I enjoyed starting with a blank space and slowly building with the new elements we'd learned each week. I'm not entirely sure how I'd like to use these skills in the future… there is definitely a lot more to learn. Nevertheless, having the resources to dabble in the digital sphere has opened up a new world of possibilities.

— Meseret Abebe

For the people who have already read my essay and those who are reading it for the first time, I would like readers to take a moment and try to think about why I have used a particular formatting tool to emphasize certain parts. I want readers to engage with their own thoughts and interpretations about what it means to be in a queer space or to stand on Indigenous land.

— Aashay Dalvi

The whole experience was very good. You know, it's a very different kind of approach to educating artists. For someone who is new to HTML and coding it's amazing for them to be able to learn how to use that power to design stories. I might be able to use this knowledge to make my WordPress blog look more professional and enhance it in a variety of ways.

— Seemab Zahra