Back in 2015, four years into producing XOXO, we decided it was about time the festival had a proper website.

Up until then, we had been designing and building three completely separate mini-sites each year: one to announce our dates, a second to publish our lineup and open registration, and a third to share our schedule with attendees.

While this gave us a great excuse to collaborate with some exceptionally talented designers, it was also wildly inefficient to build a website every time we had something new to share.

We figured it wouldn’t take much to wrap a flexible design system around a simple CMS, something we could feed new announcements, lineups, and schedules into, while still leaving space for us to express the unique and vibrant visual identity of each festival year.

Today, over 10 years later, and almost two full years after we retired the festival for good, we’re finally launching that website. Named after what we thought would be a throwaway title for a short-lived GitHub repo, allow us to introduce XOXO Explore.

XOXO Explore

We hope you’ll take the time to scroll around and notice all the little details and considerations, but let us point you in the direction of some highlights.

Each festival year now has its own index, featuring the complete lineup of every speaker, performer, artist, and project from that year, along with a detailed (and accurate!) schedule with descriptions, dates, times, and venues meticulously imported from our print attendee guide. Our recap video and conference talk videos are also prominently featured, as well as credits for each year’s patrons (thank you forever!), and, last but not least, links to a restored archive of every previous announcement, lineup, and schedule mini-site.

Our talk videos finally have a proper home on the XOXO website, filterable by year and topic, with each video page now including a talk description, relevant tags, and links to other related videos from our full archive of conference talks.

Our Guide and Blog have also been preserved, including the most recent versions of our Code of Conduct, Inclusion, Accessibility, and COVID policies, which remain available to use under a permissive Creative Commons license, and which we hope will continue to inspire other thoughtfully produced events well into the future.

And, for the first time ever (!) on an XOXO website, we now have an actual About page, where we’ve attempted to explain what XOXO actually was, documenting the 12-year history of the festival and its related projects, and featuring a bunch of our favorite quotes from press and attendees over the years.

You’ll also notice the entire site is littered with floating visual ephemera: design artifacts, illustrations, animations, photos, and videos, all pulled from our vast archive of commissions and collaborations.

We’ve been working on this version of the XOXO Explore site for over two years, and we want to take the opportunity again to thank Collin Joyce and Friends of The Web for all the hard work they put into what we’re finally launching today. We also want to thank Lizy Gershenzon, Travis Kochel, and Paulo Pereira for helping conceive the original XOXO Explore project back in 2015, and everyone who gave us permission to feature their creative work, quotes, and photography throughout.

Let’s Make Some Merch About It

One other thing you might notice is a new button in our navigation that says "Merch".

To mark the occasion, we’ve collaborated with our friends Jen and Richard at Skinny Ships to design a logo to represent all eight years of the festival, blending the primary colors from each year into a new variant of the XOXO logo.

To make up for not having a festival t-shirt in 2024, we’re printing some new XOXO letters tees featuring all eight year colors, and we’re also making a beautiful embroidered Explore logo sweatshirt, as well as enamel pins and stickers featuring our primary year colors and the new Explore logo.

We’ve also been working on a few unique and extremely limited edition items, including hand-sewn felt pins in the eight festival year colors from long-time friend of the festival Booky Margoof.

Two original LEGO sets—one of the festival layout at Washington High and another of the XOXO Explore logo—designed by Portland LEGO designer Nate Funk.

And a desktop-sized version of our lit “Lower Your Expectations” sign, fabricated by our friends at Big Secret in Richmond, Virginia.

The merch sale will run for a limited time, with pre-orders closing end of day on Friday, May 1st. Limited edition items will sell out when they do, and everything else will be made to order after the sale closes, with the plan for Buy Olympia to ship everything, all being well, by the end of June.

Appreciate Everything Endlessly

XOXO was an experimental festival celebrating independent artists and creators working on the internet that ran from 2012 to 2024.

Except, if you ever attended the festival, worked at the Outpost, were a member of the Slack, posted on our Mastodon instance, or came to a local meetup, you know that doesn’t really explain what XOXO was.

Part of the struggle of finishing a website for XOXO is that a few pages of text and some embedded images can’t possibly summarize what this thoroughly unique and extraordinary thing was.

What we can hopefully document here, at least in part, is that it was vast, and ambitious, and weird, and exciting, and, at its core, it was about people. The community is what made XOXO what it was, and attempting to present the infinite complexity of the hundreds of remarkable, courageous, empathetic, creative individuals who passed through this thing over the years cannot be simply summarized and wrapped in HTML and CSS.

We’re both incredibly proud of the work we did on and through XOXO, and we hope this archive serves as a fitting tribute to this indescribably special thing. This is the final item on our to-do list as we shut down for good, except to say goodbye.

Be well, take good care of each other, and don’t lower your expectations too much. While XOXO may be gone, we’re all still out in the world, still doing the work, and still expressing the same vibrancy and enthusiasm we’ve attempted to capture here in this very good website.

Remember: you may be independent, but you’re not alone.

— Andy & Andy