The result was a highly focused, gridbased design, with lots and lots of space to showcase our productions. The infrastructure was built using WordPress, and social media such as Twitter and Flickr was used to add personality and the ability to do quick updates to the site.

As You may understand, this causes a bit of a headache for people like me. Valid code is sometimes not enough to circumvent all quirks and bugs that exists – websites need to be tested. Setting up test environments for all possible operating systems browsers can be quite frustrating, but fortunately there are alternatives. Services like Browsershots have been around for a while, but they all suffer from the same problems – less than perfect rendering of pages, and they are awfully slow.

All except Adobe Browserlab. With Browserlab, Adobe provides an excellent service for testing webbrowsers. It may not be as good as the real thing, but the flexibility, speed and price (it’s free!) is really really hard to match!

Unfortunately I haven’t gotten around to actually printing it yet, but I’ll be sure to post some updates when that happens.

Despite that, it took me a while to understand the power of grid systems, such as 960.gs. Or rather, it took some time before I decided to try it out – after that I was sold pretty much on the get go. The concept is quite simple: you import a style sheet containing predefined classes, which allows you to deal with a simple 12 column grid instead of single pixels. Creating a simple two column layout is as simple as designating 4 columns for the sidebar and 8 columns for the content; widths, margins and floats are all taken care of by the system.

Also, as a special perk, templates are provided for most large design applications, which makes creating professional looking mockups a cakewalk. If you have yet to try 960gs – please do. I bet you won’t regret it!

Lydia Putkinen was responsible for creating a graphical profile, and my job was to design and build the website. We strived for a light and playful design, with bright colors and and a strong visual identity. The beautiful photographies were taken by Klara G.

To further simplify (and, if necessary, anonymize) communication between participants and course leaders, a custom messaging system was developed, allowing user to send private messages within the tool. Onesto is currently used by Manpower, Cut-E and Forum Forskning.

With Filt I wanted to create a website that was modern but still had an analogue feel to it. We ended up with a solution that featured a movie shot from Filts office as a backdrop and paper textures and scotch tape for the analogue touch. The two parts of the company was illustrated as “back and front” of the webpage, where going from one to the other flips the whole site horisontally. The logo and the several small illustrations were created by the incredibly talented illustrator Maja Sten.

The poster for I Scream was hand made, with photographed paper cut outs, and was used for a outdoor club in Uppsala, Sweden.