I made a little website with a romantic idea at its heart. It’s called Dear Other Side.

It began with my fascination with antipodes: wherever you’re standing right now, there’s a real place directly opposite you, on the other side of the Earth. It might be an ocean, an unfamiliar corner of South America, or somewhere you’ve never imagined visiting.

To me, this idea speaks to a familiar feeling. We get caught in the same routines, jobs, cities, and states of mind, while some small part of us still wants to escape. We don’t necessarily need to leave right away. Sometimes we just want to know: if I could go somewhere completely opposite, where would I end up?

So instead of building a straightforward antipode calculator, I made a tiny digital post office.

dear.xiaoqinghuo.netInteractive website

Write first. Discover later.

You start by writing a letter. You seal it before you know its destination, then watch it travel through the Earth. It arrives at the place directly beneath your feet, on the opposite side of the planet, and becomes a postcard you can save.

The site also reveals your antipode’s exact location on a map, its coordinates, visuals of the destination’s country or ocean, and a travel journal. If the place captures your imagination, you can follow a link to explore flights—a small opening for a spontaneous trip.

A work in progress

This is still an early version, focused on journeys that begin in China. Many antipodes of locations in China fall in or around South America, or in the ocean, so I’ve built the destination reveals, postcards, and travel journals around those outcomes first.

I designed and built Jet Lag Planner on my own. It’s an iPhone app that uses your flights and usual sleep schedule to plan when to sleep, get light, and have coffee as you cross time zones.

I built it because the usual jet lag advice leaves a lot to figure out once you have a flight booked. When should I try to sleep on the plane? What if I’m wide awake when I’m supposed to be sleeping, or I have an early meeting the day after I land? I wanted a plan that could answer those questions and adjust when I logged how I actually slept.

Try the external beta

Jet Lag Planner is currently in external testing. Open the invitation on your iPhone to try it through TestFlight.

Join on TestFlight

I made a small interactive journey for the Mid-Autumn Festival, inspired by a line of Chinese poetry: people today cannot see the moon of ancient times, yet this same moon once shone on people long ago.

I wanted to turn that feeling into something you could move through. The journey begins in the Tang dynasty and passes through Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing, before arriving in the present. Each scene offers a small gesture: touch a wine vessel, stir a bamboo leaf, tap the moon’s reflection, move a brush, or light a lantern.

Those gestures carry you from one era to the next. The paintings, sounds and transitions bring different moments together beneath the same moon.

Designed as a mobile H5 experience, the website is embedded below in its original portrait proportions. You can explore it here, or open the full website on your phone.