Creating a digital world on Notion with Chloe Almeda
Behind the scenes of A Home for Creating, a living archive of an artist's creative world
Welcome to SEE YOU—a companion for artists, thinkers, and analog lovers with ideas, inspiration, and reflections on living an intentional creative life.
Today I am interviewing artist and digital world builder Chloe Almeda for Quietly Public, a series about sharing without performing one’s self on the internet. Join to follow along!
I have long used Notion as a note-taking app and project management tool, but I never thought it was possible to use it to create one’s digital world until I stumbled upon A Home for Creating.
Created by multidisciplinary artist Chloe Almeda, A Home for Creating is her digital world and living archive that can only be accessed by paying members at $4/month or $35/year. I immediately subscribed out of curiosity and delighted in exploring Chloe’s beautifully designed Notion home.
In A Home for Creating, Chloe has thoughtfully created space for everything, including research rabbit holes, creative experiments, personal updates, in progress book notes, and intimate voice notes. Thoughts too private for the broader internet can be shared here, in her quietly public home.
Today I’m sharing my conversation with Chloe to get to know more about how she created A Home for Creating, and how this digital world supports her overall creative process. Before you dive in, get a glimpse of A Home for Creating here.
A Home for Creating is both your digital world and living archive. Can you describe when and why you started this semi-private project?
The teeny tiny seed of the idea for A Home for Creating came to me in 2021, a few months after I had gotten married (in May), was diagnosed with Bipolar (in July), and decidedly left all social media (in August).
After spending 2014 to 2020 sharing my experience with chronic illness in a very public way, I began to realize that the relationship I had with creating and sharing was not the relationship I wanted long term. I wanted to choose how and when and where to create and share, so I first had to redefine what creating and sharing online meant to me.
I signed out of my Instagram account for the last time mid-2021 and began the very delicate and slow process of becoming mentally stable again, a period of time where I created very little. On the rare occasion that I did try, it felt numb to the touch, distant and unreachable, as if my body knew I would first have to feel safe and free in my mind before I could step back into a creative life.
What followed the years of slow, quiet healing was the actual making and building out of A Home for Creating, which I started in July 2024. It is my own digital world and living archive, somewhere that can hold and support the entirety of my ever-evolving creative self.
How did you land on using Notion to host this digital world? Why not a blog or a membership website?
My love for Notion began with a longing for a more expansive and customizable digital support system, a home for all of my tasks, ideas, and projects, organized exactly to my liking. In my determination to find such a place, I landed on a template that prompted me to make an account with Notion, which then led to me to building and customizing my own digital spaces, and eventually, digital worlds.
By the time I began building A Home for Creating, Notion felt fluid and effortless. I wanted the accessibility and flexibility that I had grown so accustomed when using Notion—a digital tool that allowed me to create and share on my own terms.
It is worth noting: for as much as I love using Notion, I’m also aware that it is not a privacy forward tool, and because privacy is something I value, especially when considering the personal nature of what I’m sharing, I am curious to try out other programs as a potential new home for A Home for Creating (while also not at all feeling the need to rush into anything).
In your voice note “A website universe vs. digital world”, you share that “each digital world has its own atmosphere, its own rules of gravity, its own seasons and rhythms and cycles.” What are some of these rhythms within A Home for Creating?
My moods are intrinsically tied to my creativity, so when I first had the idea for A Home for Creating, I knew that the only way it would fit into my life would be if I were somehow able to carve out my own space online—somewhere free from the expectations of my overly critical mind.
It was years before I could even consider trusting my own creative process, to not try to predict or control every little thing. Even though I know exactly what I want for and from A Home for Creating, I still sometimes feel pressure to add more structure, create a content schedule, send weekly emails, and promote across multiple social platforms, although I have neither the desire or capacity to uphold such ideals.
In the end, I landed on this truth: in order for me to “successfully” build and create and share parts of my life online (without losing my mind), A Home for Creating’s rhythms would have to mirror my own: my mood swings, complex anxiety, OCD, introversion, fluctuating health, varying interests, layered capacities, and so on, all reflected back into this digital world.
You share intimate voice notes, creative experiments, book notes, and weekly journal entries within your digital world. What doesn’t go in this space? Do you have a private journaling practice?
A Home for Creating is for documenting and sharing the process of something, rather than the end result. It’s for giving my random ideas, half-formed projects, and projects-already-in-motion, a place to land. It’s about the experiments that feel bold and wild and unlike anything I’ve done before, and the sweet little in-betweens that always bring me back to myself.
There are, however, parts of my creative life (and life life) that I actively choose to keep private. There’s my journaling, but also how my attention now lingers on the smaller things, in a softer, gentler, and less hurried way: a rainy day spent in the pottery studio with my mom, noticing what flowers are blooming on an afternoon walk, writing out daily lists in my physical planner, doodling in my sketchbook on the back porch, keeping private notes on the books I read, and spending hours fussing over what plant should go where in the garden—all an act of personal devotion to what is most important to me right now.
What relationship do you have with paying members who have access to A Home for Creating? What kinds of constraints or expectations arise from making this digital world a paid endeavor?
I spent roughly six months actively using A Home for Creating before I decided to make it semi-public, and it was another six months before I no longer felt overly cautious in my decision to promote or bring attention to it.
To appease my overthinking mind, I decided to create an additional step-to-entry: a metaphorical lock on the metaphorical door that leads to A Home for Creating — the key for opening available to anyone that decides, “yes, I think I’d like to be a member here.”
While I’m always dreaming up new ways to build interactive and community-focused elements into A Home for Creating, I really don’t want to rush anything. For the time being, I’ll be inviting members to ask me questions or share aspects from their own creative practices with me, via a thoughtfully placed submission form.
How often do you go through your own archives? How have these archives been beneficial to your creative practice?
Sometimes I forget they’re there until I follow a thread of a thought and it leads me to a page that I haven’t visited in well over a year—and suddenly, there I am, surrounded by a past version of myself. Someone who, as I find out every time, still has so much to say and so much encouragement and support to offer.
It’s here in the archives that I can begin again and again, always coming back to the same thoughts and ideas, the concepts I’m rediscovering and reimagining through the lens of everything that I know to be true about myself now.
The archives are a reminder that all creative ideas are worth exploring, no matter how many times you have revisited them.
This interview is part of Quietly Public, a series about sharing without performing one’s self on the internet. What does being quietly public online mean to you?
Being quietly public online means building an online space that has the capacity to hold all of you—the bold and wildly creative, as well as the quiet and attentive observer. The parts of you that you’re proud of and the parts of you that you’re afraid are either too much or not enough.
It means you reclaiming a digital space as your own, or building a new one altogether and adorning it with your favorite words and art and ideas and thought spirals that remind you that different is good, different is what we need more of, and that it should always be you that decides how and where and in what capacities you’d like to be online.
Thank you Chloe! You can check out a preview of A Home for Creating here, or subscribe for access to Chloe’s Notion templates and start creating a digital world of your own.
It’s the last day to preorder Summer Practice! I finished designing this week and am excited for all the little changes I’ve made for this season. Peep the listing page for a sneak peek of the zine!
I also thought I’d start sharing snippets from my digital garden for this Quietly Public series. These are not full-fledged posts by any means, but maybe a tiny seed will spark something in you!
🌱 There is no playbook for making a business on the internet
🌱 We try to escape tech but bring its logic with us
🌱 Look to the past for novelty
This is blowing my mind, Carolyn and Chloe! You're showing me that it's possible to exist online as an artist in a thoughtful and intentional way. I loved this interview (and the pottery, omg). Thank you for writing it, Carolyn.
And thank you for sharing your digital garden. I wandered around when you first shared the link and I'm still meditating on the snippet about no waste, just compost.
I think you'd enjoy writer Jihii Jolly's library: https://thelibrary.guide/
This is fascinating and frightening all at once. Fascinating for obvious reasons. Frightening 'cause I'm scared it will lead me down yet another rabbit hole when I barely have time for all I'm involved in now. But thanks for bringing it to our attention.