About Skrollit
Scroll
your
own
Adventure.
Explore. Get lost. Have fun.
Mission
Build experiences that help you feel the true scale of the world.
We live in a multi-scale universe whose dimensions do not translate well to our human mind. We humans live at human scale, think at human scale and walk at human scale. We often imagine everything conforms to the dimensions we can hold in our hands, or brains.
Spoiler: it does not.
The ocean floor lies 10,935m (35,874ft) below the surface, 19,784m (64,908ft) lower than the top of Mount Everest — a distance most people will never truly imagine in a concrete, spatial way. Because instead, we refer to it with abstract units: picometers, kilometers, miles, light years. We use that shortcut to get a grasp on these numbers. A parsec is 30 trillion kilometers, and it sounds manageable because we gave it a name.
Skrollit makes these distances tangible, and beautiful to explore. Not as infographics or charts, but as experiences you physically scroll through, to feel the distances, the gaps, and what they mean.
Scrolling to Challenger Deep is long, and yes, sometimes boring, and it should be, because that is a far, far away place, almost an entirely alien world.
How It Works
Everything is an adventure
Every bit of data can be an adventure for the curious mind. We strive to offer immersive experiences that help discover the scale of things, but also up a moment in time with its own design language, aesthetics and captivating details. In the end, data almost becomes art.
Scroll your own adventureThe right scaling for the right exploration
Some distances or timelines, such as ocean depth or earth layers, can be rendered following a true scale, for example 10px = 100m. Others, think solar system or intergalactic space, cannot. This is where math and data visualization come into play. Not as a cheat, but as a tool to make you feel gaps and lengths, without crossing technical constraints and accessibility. We chose the most honest representation available for each page, and we let you know clearly which one it is. In the 21st century, no one should be led to think Greenland is as big as Africa.
Always scaled rightThe world is in the data
Each creature, structure, elements displayed on our explorations comes from real sources. We have researched, curated and placed each one of them with care and scientific method. Always being sober, if something is displayed, it is not random, it is needed.
Curated informationTailor your experience
Depth, temperature, pressure, weight, are customizable and allow for metric or imperial system. This choice updates immediately across the page and the site and follows your explorations.
Persistent user preferencesDesign Principles
Accessibility first
The universe has the same depth and layers for everyone. Every experience is built with keyboard navigation, screen reader support, and unit preferences in mind. Accessibility is always a part of our updates.
Low resource design
No CMS, heavy dependencies or unnecessary JavaScript. We chose Astro to accomplish that. We believe the web has an environmental impact that the industry is too comfortable ignoring. Our content is long, sometimes 100 000px or more and every byte has to be justified.
Immersion via minimalism
The moment you notice the UI, you've stopped feeling the experience we wanted to offer you. We cut back all the fat and kept everything minimalist and straight to the point.
Curiosity over completion
Skrollit experiences make you want to keep going, but not with the gratification you usually find on the web. Here, the bottom is the sad part, it is the journey that you will enjoy and remember.