Starting as a designer I’ve gradually been moving toward becoming a front-end developer (even though I've dabbled with code for over 15 years), with a main focus on the stuff that makes thing look the way they should: HTML and CSS.

I'm a huge fan of minimalism. Mainly because I believe in “form follows function”, but also because I think that the simpler a website is, the easier it is for both content creators and developers to make it as user friendly as possible.

I currently push pixels at Knowit Experience.

Frequently asked questions

People often ask me the following questions:

What does "front-end designer" mean?

I don't consider myself as a full-stack developer, nor do I like to call myself a front-end developer. Why? The problem with labels is that people have their own connotations, and peoples expectations of front-end developers have changed in the last couple of years. For me the term has always meant that you work in the front of the stack, with markup and styling, but for a lot of people nowadays it also means that you work further back in the stack, with architecture, APIs and query languages, unit testing and data handling.

This all stems from how people view front-end frameworks like React, Vue or Svelte. In these frameworks the lines between what earlier was considered to be back-end and front-end have become somewhat blurred.

For me the term "front-end designer" hopefully makes people perceive me the right way, as a designer that codes.

If you're still confused you can read more it in an article written by Brad Frost that perfectly sums up my views on the subject.

You say you love CSS, but what are your thoughts on Tailwind?

Generally I'm a fan of creating stuff with as few dependencies as possible. When it comes to Tailwind I actually haven't tried it that much. Most of the time I help customers create CMS-driven websites, not web applications. When you create layouts and blocks to be used by the web editors in a CMS, the CSS is easy enough to handle with SCSS and BEM (if done right). I have years of practice within this area.

I do, however, see Tailwind's purpose and why it has become so popular. It solves one of the main problems of CSS, scoping (well, CSS handles scoping on its own through CSS classes) and the cascade. In JS-based web applications, like React, where every component is detached and standalone, it must be nice to just toss in some styles and not having to worry about the scope, but I find it manageable enough to use SCSS and the BEM naming convention when working with mostly text-based websites (like the one you're on right now). It's easy to write, it's as close to native CSS as possible, intuitive to debug in the DevTools, and it makes the markup look clean. Seriously: inspect my website, the markup is incredibly readable.

So when it comes to Tailwind I've not used it enough to truly make up my mind about it, but I do encourage people to really think about why you'd want to abstract CSS to a framework. Same goes for CSS-in-JS libraries like Emotion and Styled components.

Do you hate colors?

Oh, you've noticed that I often create stuff in white/black/grayscale? Well, that's mostly because I suck at color theory. I just can't for the life of me figure out which colors work together. It's also because I like the simplicity of it.

What's up with the triangle at the top? Looks like Vercel's logo...

I didn't even connect the two until after this site deployed... on Vercel... Well, what can I say? Triangles are cool. It's the same shape as mountains, pyramids and the Triforce. It stays for now anyways.