About Johan

I like creatings things. May it be visual, audio, or in code. I’m fascinated by the process of building and designing software for humans, and I’ve got a huge passion for quality, simplicity, and interfaces and code which simply do more with less.

All these things boiled down to me freelancing in web design, development, and graphic design. I got a chance to work with great people on fun and interesting projects. After a sabbathical of two years, I decided in 2011 to return to school. I applied for the Software Engineering program at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. I later plan on taking a master’s degree in Interaction Design.

I’m very much into the thought that people in the IT and software business should be multi-talented. A programmer should have some clues about alignment and typography, and a visual designer should be able to prototype his or her designs in code. I feel like a Jack of All Trades, since I love design, but study and work with programming and code.

I believe every great designer or programmer should write. Therefore, I keep a blog. There are more services for contacting me at the contact page.

Curriculum Vitae

I’ve actually gotten a few things done so far. Check out my over at StackExchange Careers. If you’re interested in a more formal resume, please give me shout.

What others are saying

At a time when most designers would have thought twice about taking over the layout duties of a small magazine, poorly designed by the publisher (yes, that’s me) himself and the only instructions given was “go nuts”, Johan stepped up to the plate and delivered in style. He is an absolute pleasure to work with as he is amazingly creative, never takes short cuts and thus maintaining a very high creative output and, to put it mildly, transformed my small shoddy magazine to a successful digital publication.

I could never have done it without Johan, and now that I have the great joy of working with Johan almost on a daily basis I could never imagine doing it without him. I hope I never will.

Trivia

  • I enjoy the Swedish archipelago in the summers, where I relax, sail and swim in the ocean.
  • I am interested in fancy coffee and beer (me and dad often brew ale).
  • I have lived in Canada for a year, where I worked a Starbucks and travelled a bit.
  • I like animals.
  • I once interviewed at Apple for a Mac Specialist position in an Apple Store.
  • I could see myself work for companies like Apple, 37signals, Spotify.
  • I like to get things done.
  • I want things organized and working effectively.
  • I never decline a great party.
  • I love the creative process from idea to working product.
  • I once was a trainee at a printing press company. Really interesting, and I learned a lot about printing and graphic design.
  • I believe one should live in a warm climate, and travel to the cold snow – not vice versa.
  • I pride myself being able to take a mockup or wireframe to pixel-perfect working product.

Books I’ve enjoyed

  • The Lord of The Rings
  • Silmarillion
  • Hammer of the Gods
  • Typographic Systems
  • Jonathan Livingston Seagull
  • No One Here Gets Out Alive
  • Steve Jobs
  • Farewell To God
  • Lord of the Flies

Music I like

  • Led Zeppelin
  • The Beatles
  • The Rolling Stones
  • The Doors
  • Coldplay
  • Neil Young
  • Lou Reed
  • Kent

Check out my Spotify profile for more!

Colophon

I’m quite proud of the code I produce. Please feel free to check out the source. My dotfiles (handy shell tools and settings) are in a GitHub repo of mine.

The single largest change with this theme is its underlying structure. I’m now using Wordless – a WordPress plugin which makes theme development a lot like Rails. SCSS and CoffeeScript is automatically compiled on the fly, view and partial management is a lot more easier, helper functions are separated in neat files (bye, bye, messy functions.php), and more. Check it out!

  • I’ve build this site with WordPress, even though I don’t enjoy PHP that much … It’s on a VPS running Linux (thanks, Joacim!), managed with git.
  • It’s all HTML5 and CSS3, and looks good on tablets and mobiles.
  • The typefaces used are Lato and PT Serif.
  • I’ve build the site around different ratios, all based on the Golden Ratio. The baseline is 6px.
  • To view the baseline, add ?dev=1 to any URL in the site, and press and hold G on your keyboard.
  • SCSS for CSS preprocessing.
  • CoffeeScript for the very small amount of Javascript in this site.
  • A Rakefile for automated tasks.

Tools

  • I’m a Mac. Always will be. I’ve created everything on a MacBook Pro with a Magic Mouse.
  • Tested on an iPad 2 and iPhone 4.
  • I use TextMate for code.
  • Photoshop and Illustrator for image assets.
  • MAMP for a local PHP/MySQL dev server.
  • Google Chrome for debugging.
  • Spotify for relaxation.
  • Twitter for procrastination.
  • Terminal for everything else.

Thanks for reading!