This used to be my personal site. Now it has a company name above the door: Sandquist Media AB.
The change started when I moved my business from an enskild firma, a Swedish sole proprietorship, to an aktiebolag, a limited company. That was the occasion to give the business a name and build a visual identity around it.
Sandquist Media is still just me. I consult through the company, and I’m not planning to turn it into a large studio. The name gives my work a place to live. In a way, it has become another nickname for me.
Why Media?
My work covers more than web development and design. For testblox, for example, I’m working on 3D rendering and application design too. I enjoy that breadth, and I wanted a name that left room for it.
“Media” felt broad enough to fit the different things I do. I also just liked how Sandquist Media sounded as a company name.
Paying attention to the pixels
I’m a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to design. I spend time checking alignments and noticing small details, right down to individual pixels. That is where the pixel idea fits into the identity: it connects to how I actually work.
The mark and the square pixel typography carry that through the site. The longer passages use simpler type, while the backgrounds add movement and texture.
#000000#1C0024#B4A2B9#A86CB8Purple was a more spontaneous choice. I was drawn to it. I don’t see it used in branding as often as some other colours, and I like how much it pops. There isn’t a deeper story behind that choice; it was a colour I wanted to work with.
Still a personal space
I want this site to hold both the work I do for clients and the projects I build for myself. For now, it makes sense to keep them together. They are all part of what I spend my time making and learning.
The blog will be more personal. A problem I ran into and how I solved it. A technology I tried. An interest that turned into a project. I want to have somewhere to write about those things while they are still fresh, including the small experiments that might never become portfolio pieces.
One of those stories is already waiting to be written: replacing the loud Dell rack server in my living room with a much smaller home-server setup. It involved looking at what I actually used, slimming down the services I ran, and moving on from hardware that no longer suited my home.
That is the kind of thing you can expect here alongside the client work. There is a new name on the site, but it is still a place for what I’m working on and what interests me.