“Hey, my name is Christofer Sandin. I’m a former athlete, running a design and technology company called Republic Factory in Göteborg, Sweden. Republic recently joined 99x. This is my personal site.”

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.

An experiment in style. Set your preferred theme and color, from high fidelity to low.

There are four different themes, each with three different color settings, white, color and black, on this site. You decide which one you prefer with the icons in the top center.

  • The classic mode, the C, represents the old serif based site with some textures. The font in this theme is Charter, and the whole look is more sophisticated.

  • The M is the Monospace theme, where the content is displayed using the fixed-width font Commit Mono and gives it the feel of a text-based computer interface.

  • 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 PCs. A 286 PC running DOS was my introduction to computers as a kid, and something about that font makes me feel cozy inside.

Working with the Internet

I started using the Internet when you still had to dial an ISP with a modem before the web was even 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 while downloading things. That was when the web was born, and I started to create websites.

01♥ - Check out binarypassion.com to nerd out 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 had 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.

Reading books

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.

The Journal

During my athletics career, I wrote quite a bit on the web, but I've written next to nothing in the last few years. I keep the old entries online in the archive, mostly for my own amusement.

Photos

I have a couple of photos from the Track and Field days, but I haven't posted many photos online. I keep my Flickr account around, though.