Douglas Coupland is one of Canada's favourite sons, the author of Generation X and Jpod and Roots is its national brand. Together they have made a limited edition collection of bright streetwear pieces that aims to redirect your imaginings of what Canada really is.

Do you remember when websites were exciting and fun and hard to navigate with bizarre and exciting graphics? Back in the early days of the interwebs, perhaps before you were even born, websites were crazy, bright and full of errors. Crazy like the new Roots x Douglas Coupland website.

To Coupland, it is not moose and maple leaves, but a country that had its technology sorted out early, while the USSR and USA were distracted by cold war and the eastern block was still in lock down. So his collection features the old TV test pattern, electrical pylons, calculator circuitry in leather jackets, leggings, T-shirts, bags and wallets.

To me, and I've crossed it from Vancouver to the Alaskan border and the French part, twice, Canada is a place to go to drink out of those red cups like in the movies at yard parties with socialist uni grads, a place that breeds people like Mark Fast, a place to do brilliantly dodgy things in far out woods with only the lakes and some mud as a witness, to meet punks in Toronto and junkies in the wrong parts of Vancouver, to get excellent vintage fashion pieces and be reminded what real mountains look like.

But the features of the collection are nothing on the site that hosts it. It is rammed with goodness. Pages shatter into beautiful big pixels to take you to new sections. It's packed with downloadable posters of all the art featured, loads of videos on how he dresses characters to Coupland's favourite Pantone colours and embedded tweets tagged with the author's name or Roots.

What's so impressive about this whole project is that it wasn't dreamed up by some floppy-fringed hipsters with time on their hands and money from Dad. Take a look at the videos below at the age of the guys at Roots. Sometimes for a project to be truly inspiring you need more than new web skills, you need to know firsthand what it was like before information architecture and useability crushed the wonder out of your web experience.