Turn Your Browsing History into a Beautiful Printed Publication

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to hold your browsing history in your hands? What would all those hours of baby sloths, Google searches like “can you eat the black part of a banana” and trap remixes of pop songs actually look like on the printed page? Probably pretty good, actually. HTTPrint is a data visualisation project that takes your search history and turns it into a beautiful, personalised, physical broadsheet publication.

We see traditional media mirror its content digitally all the time—we can look at a magazine’s fashion shoot on their website, or read a classic on Kindle—but what’s more unusual is when something begins digitally and ends physically. HTTPrint opens up a new dialogue between the two types of media, which are often thought of in binary terms, and turns the URL into the IRL.

HTTPrint was conceived by ECAL design graduate Emilie Pillet as her diploma project. Working in collaboration with programmer Thierry Treyer, they developed a Chrome extension that tracks your browsing history, collecting content and metadata from each page you visit—including the web address, time spent on page, images and text. The publication’s layout is then computer-generated based on this data, even though it looks like each element was carefully placed by your very own art director, with time acting as the main parameter. For example, if you stay on a page for a small amount of time, the images are displayed in a smaller size while the text is larger.

Emilie was inspired to start the project after gaining interest in digital media throughout her studies. “Even though I am deeply attracted to the printed media, I wanted to explore how these two could somehow merge or at least relate to the other,” she tells The Creators Project. “My point of view is that the two have very specific properties, which make them irreplaceable. What we should consider instead is how the two can merge or learn from each other to augment our experience with media, either printed or digital.”

We can’t help but be curious as to what the physical incarnation of her own browsing data would look like. “One thing I can tell you is that you won’t find Facebook, or other social networks… I am not really into these things, except for Instagram,” she says.

Unfortunately HTTPrint is not ready for a wide public release yet as the Chrome extension currently requires users to disable some of the browsers security. Check out Emilie Pillet’s site to stay up-to-date on the project and view her other work.

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