Good Sense And Madness

5 mins read

A coastal view of ships sailing from Tarragona’s port
Tarragona, the capital of the Costa Daurada in Catalonia

An evergreen joke within the design community is that no one finishes their portfolio. It’s this Sisyphean task where designers are perpetually opening Figma, disliking their work, and closing Figma. Perhaps that speaks to the perfectionist nature of designers who hold themselves to impossibly high visual standards, constantly redesigning personal sites instead of shipping anything of note.

It’s been two years since I made an update to my site. Since then, we’ve had two UK Prime Ministers, 900 million people using ChatGPT each week, and a Brat summer. No Grand Theft Auto VI (yet). I’ve launched personal projects over the past 12 months but it’s time I put more focus back on this domain. Equipped with a free weekend, Paper, Claude CLI, and Obsidian, I’ve made some changes.

The last iteration of the site was a custom Ghost template I dedicated to Gothenburg: home to Roy Andersson and a taxidermy museum where you can drink tea inside a marine mammal. I like to take inspiration from a city and weave it into the design. This is what I wrote at the time:

A new morning, a new blog. One that I want to dedicate to the great Swedish director Roy Andersson, who lives in most of my work as a reminder of what makes us human. I was watching his new feature film, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence and the third in his “living” series, while building my own Ghost theme. I will call it Gothenburg—after Andersson’s home town, mostly because there’s a natural history museum where you can drink tea inside the abdomen of a whale. It’s also home to the mighty Blåvitt.

The Gothenburg theme was warm, modest, and understated, with the kind of deadpan humour you get with Göteborgsvits throughout. Upon reflection, it was too restrained and perhaps one of the reasons it lacked updates. It was meant to be lightweight, but ended up merely functional. I wanted the new design to leave room for playfulness. There will be a red thread throughout the old and new, outlined by my personal principles and taste, but it will be malleable enough to keep up with evolving ideas.

I’ve spent the last two summers in Catalonia playing Spikeball with friends. Life seems so simple when stripped back to good weather, good food, and good people. Of course, it’s always great to make it to Barcelona where the city feels so alive with history and diversity, especially from our base in El Poblenou, the old Catalan Manchester. I even watched FC Barcelona put five past Rayo at the Camp Nou. But getting out to peaceful country towns like Canyelles is nourishing for the soul. Touching grass, away from digital distractions.

A bird’s-eye view of Gimnàstic de Tarragona’s football stadium called Nou Estadi Costa Daurada
Nou Estadi Costa Daurada, the home of Gimnàstic de Tarragona

Further down the coast, I grew a fondness for Gimnàstic de Tarragona: a small club in Spain’s third division and one of the oldest football teams in the country. They wear the same colours as my home team Manchester United and, so far, seem to be doing just as rubbish. A shared trauma. I like that about them. A never say die attitude even when sporting success is hard to come by. I’m dedicating the new site to Tarragona and its patient fans.

Catalans describe themselves as seny i rauxa, a swing between level-headedness and sudden outbursts. In the city’s cathedral, a place designed for silence, there’s a carving of rats carrying a cat to its funeral, made eight hundred years ago by a mason who clearly couldn’t help himself. Seny shows up as pragmatism: it does the thing it needs to do as a personal site. My taste, my work. Rauxa shows up as little experiments: it acts as a playground while I try things with Claude. My creative outbursts, sometimes disposable. Seny provides an even surface so the rauxa has somewhere to land.

There’s still restraint, which reflects the simplicity I aim for. I believe a site should be a site, not a bear riding a bicycle. A user will go to this page trying to learn more about me and that shouldn’t be made more difficult by things that get in the way. However, this time there’s room for flair, which I hope comes through in the details. The preloader that offers a brief glimpse of my world, priming content with fade in and blur techniques, and an easter egg with the palette of Tarragona.

A cityscape view of the old town in Tarragona
A cityscape view of the old town in Tarragona

That doesn’t mean compromising on the user experience either. The latest Lighthouse run (slow 4G mobile throttling) gave a score of 100 for both performance and accessibility. The site is built on Astro. Every page is put together ahead of time and sent finished, with almost no JavaScript tagging along behind it. You ask, it’s there.

I’d be lying if I didn’t feel a little sadness in moving away from Ghost, which I backed during their Kickstarter. But it also marks the start of a personal tooling era where we can just make stuff with AI. I’m using Obsidian to write this post, and Claude wrote a script which publishes it to an Astro page. If I’d done it by hand, I’d still be opening and closing Figma, instead of deploying it to Cloudflare Pages like I am today.

Maybe I’ll post more now, maybe I won’t, but I finally feel like I have my playground to try things. Simplicity isn’t about having less to say. In Gothenburg, restraint was kind of the point. In Tarragona, it’s the backbone for something impulsive.

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