About

The periodic table is an incredible achievement. It helps us understand ourselves, the world around us and the universe.

This website is a tribute to the periodic table as an artefact: something that has been built, grown and iterated on for more than 200 years, consolidating the work of hundreds of people. Scientists, innovators and contributors who discovered elements, pushed past the limits of what seemed possible and found a way to turn all of it into a simple system that works for everyone and will be used for generations to come.

How it started

Back in 2019 I came across a video of Professor Brian Cox , explaining how the 92 naturally occurring elements are the building blocks of everything we can see in the universe. Obviously, I didn't pay any attention in science class, and didn't spend any time thinking about it until that moment. I thought it was pretty sick that basically everything is made of these basic building blocks, and I started learning more about the elements and the table itself.

The other thing that got me is that the periodic table isn't finished(*). It's been evolving alongside our understanding of the world for two centuries, and in that process it has kept changing shape. Lavoisier's list of 33 elements in 1789. Döbereiner's triads. Newlands' octaves. Mendeleev's table with gaps left for elements nobody had found yet. Moseley reordering everything by atomic number. And that's just the science. Along the way, chemists, designers and enthusiasts have drawn the table as spirals, towers and 3D shapes, showing that creativity and science can go hand in hand.

I did a lot of research online and couldn't find a truly interactive site where you could explore how the table has evolved and dig into the elements themselves, things like electron configuration, while browsing through the history at the same time. So the idea of building it myself started to form.

I also read a lot of books about the elements. Two that really stood out are The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean and Elemental by Tim James. They inspired me to take the project forward, and I started learning React and Three.js to build the site. Then Covid happened, other priorities took over, and I parked the idea... for a long time.

Building it (twice)

When ChatGPT came out in late 2022 I started playing around with it but it wasn't good enough to take on a project like this. On 2 April 2023 I made the first commit for this project on GitHub. I built lots of things I never thought I'd be able to, like a JavaScript function that generates electron orbitals. But I was working on it in my spare time, which wasn't much, and at some point I realised there was so much left to do that I started to wear down. I parked it again.

In September 2026 OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, so I gave it my old project and wrote a long prompt asking it to finish it. The result wasn't perfect, but it was 80% there. I spent the next few days tweaking the things that mattered most to me and decided to make it public.

What's next

I'll keep growing the site over time, and I'd love your feedback, suggestions and comments to help me prioritise the features that would be most useful to you and others.

I'm also looking for sponsors interested in supporting the site so I can keep adding more table designs, new features, and a shop with merch for nerds to help keep my motivation up.

If you've got any of the above, get in touch. Anyway, thanks for visiting, I hope you enjoy the site!

Cheers,

Juan

Get in touch

* Why the table isn't finished

  • New elements. Labs in Japan (RIKEN), Russia, Germany, China and the US are actively trying to make elements 119 and 120, which would start an eighth row. As of this year nobody has confirmed either, and articles from May 2026 still describe 119 as unmade.
  • Layout arguments. IUPAC still hasn't settled which elements belong in group 3 (lanthanum/actinium vs lutetium/lawrencium), and where hydrogen and helium should sit is a long-running debate. Different published tables genuinely disagree on this.
  • Whether periodicity holds at the top end. Relativistic effects in superheavy atoms mean oganesson probably isn't a noble gas in any useful sense, which raises the question of whether the pattern the table is built on keeps working beyond row 7.