Home | Christofer Sandin
— Digital Garden
“Hey, my name is Christofer Sandin. This is my personal site. I’m a former athlete, running a design and technology company called Republic Factory in Göteborg, Sweden.”
This site came to life back in 2002 when I trained and competed in athletics. Although I never reached the biggest arenas and the Olympics, like a few people I trained with, I could travel the world, compete in many different places, and keep myself in pretty good shape. That's also where I met my wife.
Today, the site is slowly transitioning into a personal site where I write and think about digital work.
There are four different themes, each with four color choices, on this site. You decide which one you prefer with the icons in the top center.
The M is the Monospace theme, where the content is displayed using the fixed-width font Commit Mono and gives you a feeling of a text-faced computer-inspired theme.
The classic mode, the C, represents the old serif based site with some textures. The font in this theme is Charter and is overall more sophisticated.
The S, without serifs, represents the Swiss design-inspired theme set in the Inter font. This plays on the fact that Sweden and Switzerland sometimes get mixed up in global references. So instead of portraying Swedish white, clean minimalism which we are famous for, I chose a grid and type-inspired Swiss design.
The last icon is an 8 representing the 8-bit font used on old IBM PC's. A 286 PC running DOS was my introduction to computers as a kid, and something about that font makes me feel cozy inside.
I started using the Internet when you still had to dial an ISP with a modem before the web even was a thing, and IRC was the way to talk to other people on the net. Back then, you also called Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and enjoyed the great-looking ANSI graphics that enabled you to download things. That was when the web was born, and I started to create websites.
01♥ - Check out binarypassion.com to nerd down on text mode graphics.
I taught web design in 1998, and since then, I have worked with the web professionally in one way or another. I was having it as a side hustle while studying for my master's, alongside my athletic career, and then for real since 2006 when I went full-time. First as a freelancer and then running Republic together with colleagues.
To this day, this is my professional life, and I couldn't be happier with that choice.
I read occasionally, and I have put up a summary of a few books that I thought were worthwhile. The subjects range from personal growth and development to running a business. There are also a few titles that are more of a general interest if you have a curious mind regarding technology, economy, and logic.
During my athletics career, I wrote quite a bit on the web, but my writing has been close to none in the last few years. But I do keep the archives online for my amusement. The old entries are in the archive.
I have a couple of photos from the Track and Field days, but I haven't posted many photos online. But I keep my Flickr account around.