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Side Project
Web Design & Dev

Interesting
Places

A curated atlas of the world's most fascinating, offbeat, and overlooked locations — built for curious people who travel to feel something.

Type
Side Project
Role
Design & Dev
Status
Live
Places

Why I Built It

I've always been drawn to places that don't make the top-ten lists — the ones that have a story, a strangeness, or a quiet that makes you stop. I couldn't find a single place online that collected them well.

Most travel content is algorithm-driven — optimised for clicks, not curiosity. Interesting Places is the opposite: a slow, deliberate collection of places worth knowing about, designed to make you want to go.

Discovery gapTravel apps surface the same 50 destinations. The genuinely interesting places — the ones with texture — are invisible.
Context over coordinatesA pin on a map tells you nothing. Every place needs its history, its mood, its reason to exist.
Design as editorialThe way a place is presented shapes how you feel about visiting it. Most travel sites treat this as an afterthought.

The Experience

01

Discover

Browse a hand-curated collection of places across the world — filtered by mood, geography, and the kind of experience you're after.

02

Read

Each place gets an editorial entry: what makes it interesting, its history, and the context that makes it worth caring about.

03

Go

Practical links and context when you're ready to move from curious to committed.

Interesting Places platform mockup

What I Learned

Content-first products require a different design instinct. The editorial quality of each entry shapes the entire platform feel — a single poorly described place pulls the whole experience down.

Building for curiosity rather than conversion removed a lot of typical product anxieties and let me focus on what actually makes a great reading experience.

Content is the productThe design can only do so much — the quality of each place's write-up determines whether someone returns or not.
Restraint over feature-creepEvery feature idea I had — ratings, maps, user submissions — made the product noisier. Saying no was the most important design decision.
Slow products have loyal audiencesCurated, unhurried experiences attract people who actually read, share, and come back — a smaller but far more engaged group.
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