Here's a thing I learned building Modern Retro that nobody told me and I didn't read anywhere: the container matters as much as the content. Maybe more. An extraordinary image shared in a tweet disappears in seconds. The same image, presented in a gallery with considered typography, thoughtful spacing, and a coherent brand identity, becomes something you remember. The art didn't change. The frame did.
This isn't a new idea, obviously. Gallery owners and museum curators have known this for centuries. The white cube gallery exists because someone worked out that the context in which you encounter art fundamentally shapes how you experience it. A Rothko in a living room is decoration. A Rothko in the Tate Modern is transcendence. Same painting. Different container.
But what's new - and what I think most people building things on the internet still have not grasped - is that this principle applies to everything digital, and that the tools to build beautiful containers are now available to everyone. You don't need to be a developer to build a gallery. You need taste.
The Modern Retro lesson
When I started Modern Retro, I was focused entirely on the images. Could AI generate convincing 1970s retail store fronts for modern brands? That was the question. And once I had the answer - yes, spectacularly - I thought the hard part was done. I had the art. All I needed was somewhere to put it.
That somewhere turned out to be the actual project. The site, the layout, the way the images are presented, the typography, the navigation, the overall experience of browsing through eighty-six reimagined brands - that is Modern Retro. Not the images. The gallery. If I had just posted those images on Instagram or dumped them into a Google Drive folder, they would have been interesting for about thirty seconds. The gallery made them into something people wanted to explore, share, and come back to.
I think about this constantly now. When I look at the other things I've built - a pub guide, a children's activity directory, a culture aggregator - the ones that feel best are the ones where I thought about the container first. Not the content. The experience of encountering that content. How does it feel to land on this page? What's the first thing you notice? Does the design communicate the personality of what's inside before you read a single word?
Presentation as persuasion
In advertising, we called this craft. The idea is just the beginning. The execution - the typography, the art direction, the editing, the sound design, the pacing - that's what separates good from great. A good idea badly executed is worse than a decent idea beautifully executed, because people respond to how things feel, not just what they say.
The same is true for products. Monocle didn't become the most respected media brand by having the best journalism. They became it by presenting their journalism like a piece of art. Their website looks better than most companies' marketing sites. Their print edition looks better than most coffee table books. They understood that the container - the way the content is presented, designed, and experienced - is inseparable from the content itself.
Bloomberg Businessweek understood this too. A business publication should be dry. Bloomberg is anything but. Not because it covers fundamentally different stories from other business publications, but because it's presented with such obsessive attention to detail that reading it feels like reading something premium, something designed by people who care about the craft of editorial as much as its content.
Why most side projects fail at this
Most people building side projects think about the content or the functionality first, and the presentation last. I know this because I did it too, with the early projects. You build the thing, you get it working, and then you slap on some CSS, choose a font, pick a colour palette from some generator, and call it done. The result is something that works but doesn't feel like anything. It's functional but forgettable.
The irony is that the presentation is often the easiest part to get right, once you decide it matters. You don't need to be a designer. You need to have seen enough good design to know what it looks like, and you need to care enough to match that standard. Choosing the right typeface, getting the spacing right, picking colours that work together, creating a visual hierarchy that guides the eye - these are learnable skills. But you have to believe they matter first.
I think many builders, especially technical ones, believe that presentation is superficial. That what matters is the code, the architecture, the functionality. That good design is a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have. This is wrong, and I say this as someone who came from the other direction - from a world where presentation was everything and the underlying functionality was someone else's problem. The truth is in the middle, but it's closer to the design end than most engineers would like to admit.
The container as brand
Here's the deeper point. When you build a gallery - when you invest in the container - you're building a brand. And a brand is the most durable thing you can create. The individual images in Modern Retro might become less novel over time as AI image generation becomes commonplace. But the Modern Retro brand - the aesthetic, the point of view, the specific sensibility that chose those brands and that era and that treatment - that is unique. That can't be replicated by technology. That's taste, codified into a visual identity.
Apple understood this better than anyone. The Apple Store isn't a shop. It's a gallery for their products. The packaging isn't just a box. It's part of the experience. Every touchpoint communicates the same thing: this is premium, this is considered, every detail matters. The container - from the store to the box to the software interface - is inseparable from the product.
You might think this only works for companies with Apple's resources. It doesn't. It works for a solo builder in London with Claude Code and a conviction that presentation matters. I know because I've done it. The difference between a project that gets shared and one that gets ignored is rarely the idea. It is the execution. It is the gallery.
Build the frame first
My practical advice, to anyone building anything on the internet, is counterintuitive: build the gallery before you make the art. Decide what the experience should feel like before you have the content to fill it. Create the container first.
This sounds backwards, but it works for a specific reason. When you design the container first, you create constraints for the content. Those constraints make the content better. If you know the gallery has a certain layout, a certain rhythm, a certain visual language, then you know what kind of content belongs there and what doesn't. The container becomes a filter. It becomes an editor. It becomes taste made structural.
This is exactly what print magazines did. The design template - the grid, the typefaces, the image treatment, the column widths - existed before the content. And when the content arrived, it was shaped by those constraints into something coherent. Something that felt like it belonged. Something that was part of a whole rather than just a collection of parts.
I think the internet has largely forgotten this lesson. Social media platforms are containers, but they're generic ones - the same frame for every piece of content, regardless of what it's or who made it. The beauty of building your own thing is that you can build a container that is specific. That communicates your point of view before a single word is read or a single image is viewed. That makes everything inside it feel like it belongs together.
The gallery isn't the afterthought. The gallery is the project. Build it first. Fill it later. And if the art is good and the gallery is better, you've made something that lasts.
