Some stories have very long beginnings, and a tiny seed randomly planted in 2007 becomes a towering tree by 2024.

In 2007, I, Fulvio Romanin, was working a freelance web designer; my main market was music festivals, and because I managed about twenty of them, winning awards of various kinds with highly diversified experiences, I was asked to teach at the Festival of Festivals in Bologna, a gathering of all industry operators. I was given the “lectern” to train on managing festival websites, which – at the time – was still uncharted territory for many of my audience. Among my students was this very attentive girl, Francesca Michelini, who took extremely careful notes. She was there representing the MiTo Settembre Musica Festival, for which she would manage a significant part of the communication, including the web. She was skilled, and it showed.

To my surprise, a few months later, me and my friend and colleague Andrea Lodi, also a teacher at – on the social side – at the same festival, were asked to participate in the tender to create the festival. We joined forces in a temporary business structure. We received the brief with the desired features for the site creation: in fact, they were the notes from our lessons.
Fun fact: unfortunately, we did not win the tender. As prepared as we were, probably the festival needed a much more solid structure behind it. That’s okay: we took it well. Acquaintance was made, and its tiny seed was planted.

It took almost six years for the seed to sprout: MiTo remembered me, and I was summoned to digitize a huge archive, MiTo Legacy – over 200 CD-ROMs, VHS tapes, video DVDs, and various hard drives to be unified into a single corpus on a private network. The project was successful, to everyone’s satisfaction. I was surprised when I received another call from Milan.

Partly due to geographical distance, partly because I had been abroad a lot, I confess that in those years I visited Milan only occasionally, but after the Expo 2015, it literally blossomed into the most European of Italian cities. The scenic and spectacular heart of the city, where the Unicredit building towers above the ultra-modern Piazza Gae Aulenti, is definitely the Portanuova district, one of the most prestigious urban regeneration plans in Europe. In the middle of Isola, in front of the Vertical Forest, there is a park. It’s called BAM – Biblioteca degli Alberi Milano, and was designed and conceived with Piet Oudolf, already at work on the High Line in New York: a futuristic and sustainable green lung that makes the city center unique. The entire district, including the park, was developed by COIMA.

COIMA is a leading group in investment, development, and management of real estate assets on behalf of Italian and international institutional investors, active in the Italian real estate sector since 1974. The group includes COIMA SGR, which manages over 30 alternative real estate investment funds; COIMA REM, specialized in property management and development; COIMA HT, which operates in the technology and digital fields; and COIMA Image, active in the design of interior spaces. The Riccardo Catella Foundation, part of the group, promotes civic and cultural initiatives to improve the quality of urban life.

Inside this complex lies the Riccardo Catella Foundation, whose Cultural General Director is Francesca Colombo, formerly head of MiTo: she manages the park with a clear non-profit inclusive and eco-sustainable vision in mind.

In the meanwhile, I was not a freelancer anymore, but together with Giulio Pecorella, I founded Ensoul, which was invited to participate in the tender for the creation of the Biblioteca degli Alberi di Milano website.
It was a massive job, with a level of technical complexity sophisticated for our forces and the technologies involved, but we decided to take the risk and, lo and behold, we won.

Creating the BAM website required almost eight months of constant effort by nine developers, including the mid-August holiday: starting from an Interbrand concept and navigating through interactive maps in WebGL, ticket booking systems with membership systems and wallet generation, membership systems, and hundreds of events a year.
We became regulars at the park, enjoying the Back to the City Concerts and creating a solid and genuine human rapport that lasts to this day.

And the BAM site grows and gets noticed: it is COIMA Image, the COIMA company dedicated to interior design and space planning, that proposes us to participate in the tender for their site. Once again, we win, and the site is truly a pleasure to create: COIMA Image has a range of quality products, and its staff guides us in creating a contemporary breath portfolio. In just three months, we manage to create a fast, accessible, and sustainable structure also in terms of CO2 consumption.

And it’s all new and the story is still to be written, but we are pleased to announce that from the first of April this year, we have been entrusted with managing the institutional sites of COIMA, which represent all the editorial and informational variations on the activities of the entire group: solid structures in Laravel and Contentful that are familiar to us. And we are obviously eager to contribute concretely and proactively to the evolution and growth of these structures, consolidating and completing a professional relationship that began from a tiny seed, nurtured and cherished for almost fifteen years.

(In loving memory of Francesca Michelini. We miss you.)

We are excited to announce our recent partnership with Aspergeronline, a network dedicated to promoting awareness and inclusion of neurodivergent individuals. Ensoul is firmly committed to the belief that an inclusive, accessible internet is essential, and our collaboration with Aspergeronline builds upon our ongoing efforts in the Ghiti project and beyond.

This collaboration merges innovative digital projects with a strong dedication to sustainability and accessibility. Aspergeronline ETS, founded in December 2023, has quickly become a leading digital platform, amassing over 127,000 registered users in just the first six months of its operation. Conversely, Ensoul is renowned for creating digital infrastructures for organizations committed to policies that cater to everyone.

“We share the goal of making information and user experiences accessible to all end-users,” says Simone Favarin, commenting on the partnership. He adds, “Specifically, Aspergeronline has evolved into a technocratic network, providing a wealth of scientifically validated information through our main site, six thematic sites overseen by a scientific committee, and an online community. With digital tools such as free assessments and regional maps, we are dedicated to making information on neurodiversity accessible to everyone.”

Innovative digital projects that are engaging, informative, and aimed at fostering positive societal change are emerging. We are proud to be part of this collective effort, offering support and encouragement among organizations that uphold the same values.

We warmly invite you to visit www.aspergeronline.org to learn more about these crucial topics.

Let’s be honest – we were bold.

When we received the invitation to participate in the FVG¹ Energy Awards and reviewed the requirements to be awarded, it was clear that we didn’t fit the bill.

The prize rules talked about streamlining energetically your factory, refurbishing warehouses, using alternative energy sources, consuming less fuel, and so on. But we don’t do any of that, and the optimizations we can make to our supply chain are minimal.

However, the internet consumes a lot of energy. In fact, it’s the fourth largest consumer of energy in the world. And we can significantly reduce the energy consumption of our users.

For example, the BAM website alone (with 10,000 visitors per month) saves the equivalent of a 400km plane flight or 825km by car per year.

This gives a clearer idea of the impact of our work.

We looked at each other and said, “Should we try?” “Sure.”

The organization contacted us and invited us to a dinner at the Casa della Contadinanza in Udine Castle. To our surprise, we won a special mention. The organizers understood our spirit.

Building a Sustainable Web: Our Commitment to Accessibility, Sustainability, and Collaboration

We believe that the web has the potential to be a powerful force for good. However, the environmental impact of the web and its accessibility issues can often hinder its positive potential. We are committed to building a sustainable web, one that is not only accessible to all but also minimizes its environmental footprint.

Accessibility: No One Left Behind

We believe that everyone deserves equal access to the information and opportunities available online. This is why we are dedicated to developing and maintaining websites that are accessible to people with disabilities, regardless of their physical, sensory, or cognitive abilities. We achieve this by:

• Following WCAG guidelines: We adhere to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These guidelines outline specific criteria for making web content accessible to people with disabilities.
• Employing assistive technologies: We use tools and techniques that allow users with disabilities to access and interact with our websites, such as screen readers, keyboard navigation, and alternative text descriptions for images.
• Continuous testing and improvement: We regularly test and evaluate our websites for accessibility and strive to continuously improve our practices.

Sustainability: Minimizing our Environmental Impact

The web’s energy consumption and carbon footprint are significant concerns. We are committed to minimizing our environmental impact by:

• Utilizing energy-efficient servers: We choose to partner with data centers that utilize renewable energy sources and employ energy-efficient server technologies.
• Optimizing website performance: We optimize our websites for speed, reducing the amount of energy required to load them. This includes techniques like image compression, code optimization, and efficient content delivery networks.
• Promoting sustainable practices: We share information and resources about sustainable web practices with our clients and the broader digital community.

Collaboration: Building a Better Web Together

We recognize that building a sustainable and accessible web requires collective effort. We actively collaborate with organizations that share our values, such as Aspergeronline.net. This collaboration allows us to:

• Share knowledge and best practices: We work together to learn from each other’s experiences and develop innovative solutions for a more sustainable and accessible web.
• Raise awareness: We collaborate on initiatives to raise awareness about the importance of web accessibility and sustainability among organizations and individuals.
• Advocate for change: We work together to advocate for policies and practices that encourage the development of a more sustainable and inclusive web.

Sharing Our Knowledge: The Power of Education

Last Christmas, we gifted our customers with an e-book that delves deeper into the topic of sustainable web development. This e-book explores the environmental impact of the web, the importance of accessibility, and best practices for building sustainable and accessible websites. We plan to make this e-book publicly available this spring to further contribute to the discourse and empower others to build a better web.

By focusing on accessibility, sustainability, and collaboration, we strive to create a web that is not only accessible to all but also environmentally responsible. We believe that through dedication, collaboration, and education, we can all contribute to a more inclusive and sustainable digital future.

Foreword: this article had been originally written in june 2022. AI has improved enormously ever since, so the old images here displayed are now ridiculously low-level compared to actual ones, and the text somehow outdated. But the concept still remains valid.
In modern images I just picked one to showcase the level of detail. Please consider that, among the four, I usually picked the one that contextually was similar to the old one for comparison. But even if this was kind of similar, the others were not so radically different.

PLEASE USE THE SLIDER TO COMPARE IMAGES. LEFT 2022, RIGHT 2024.

---

This is the story of a child born in a prison without windows, and he is extraordinarily good at drawing. In the same prison cell live dozens, hundreds of people who incessantly tell him stories and fables about the outside world — a world he has never seen or experienced on his own. To kill time, he tries to portray the world starting from the stories he’s told.

He never really has been able to look outside: all the information he has access to happens by nurture, not by nature. When asked to draw a successful man, he portrays him as a caucasian middle-aged male in a suit and tie, the word beauty evokes a woman with Angelina Jolie cheekbones, the word God prairies of crosses and clouds, a black man comes portrayed with sculpted pecs, the hero is a humongously chested knight. His cellmates aren’t necessarily Caucasian males, though, yet the stories converge on recurring stereotypes.

“God”

“God” in 2022 seemed like a computer divinity. Now the Marvel world has taken its place.

“Beauty”

---

“Beauty” in 2022 was some girl with erythema. In 2024 is a sort of Baroque noblewoman rolling in the fields. Fact: always a white woman.

As a matter of fact the child cannot even get out of his cell, because he is not even a child but the closest thing to a child that humanity, in evolutionary terms, has produced: an artificial intelligence. And, as in a mirror — as a child does to a certain extent — he talks about us with innocent eyes, telling us back his adult-fed, naive, vision of our own world.

“Success”

---

“Success” has refined in its metaphore, and the icon-looking white male has become some Reinhold Messner lookalike, still in a suite.

It’s all obviously living in the uncanny valley realm; the drawings look like without really being: they are an inaccurate, yet often creepy, representation of reality. Faces can look perfectly symmetrical and attractive, but without a portion of the head, or with three hands; a family sitting at the table looks like guests from the Addams family dinner. But its superficial meaning appears instantly clearly to us, though.

“Family”

---

“Family” changed from a dinner with Spider-man as a guest to a somehow Hamish, creepy looking family. Maybe this is telling us something about the average feelings about family. Yes, always white people.

“Treehouse”

---

A few weeks ago the always excellent Luca Malisan sent me the link to Midjourney, one of these GAN artificial intelligences, where, with a few descriptive commands, a user can generate awesome images, refinable through iteration, commands and accurate descriptions.

(this above used to be the poster image for Midjourney. Same prompt, two years later)

The beautiful image you see above was created using the phrase “giant tree-house with mid-century modern stylings, ropes, vines, rope ladders and large windows decorate its sides, high breaking through the misty clouds, atmospheric, rain forest, kodak, fuji film, hgtv, 12k ursa, cinematic”, and it is really very beautiful and full of details: our child draws with skill and imagination.

It is nearly magic, perhaps, in the way we used to think about magic — you own the name and the words, and this becomes real: although only on the pixels of a computer, for now, with a single formula that looks like a magic spell we can generate and distort the reality that surrounds us.
And the more accurate our spell is, the more powerful and beautiful our magic will be.

“Maternity”

---

(“maternity”: some Picassian lady made way for a baroque-looking madonna with bird and child with creepy eyes. Still, all white people)

The object to my research, however, was not to obtain photorealistic results — I have no artistic ambitions whatsoever — but to see how much the deeper, more anthropological part of its results were influenced by whose cultural stereotypes. I generated a series of images based on “primitive” concepts (“motherhood”, “hero”, “successful person”) so to speak, and not entirely abstract (“love”), reiterating the same request several times to see how much results varied from time to time, being especially careful to provide as little detail as possible. And the result is quite uniform, as clear beyond words: it’s mostly a white man’s world.

“Hero”

---

(“hero” has not changed much, apparently: the broad-chested white male still prevails. And yes, I guess Midjourney might have some copyright issues)

The database these algorithms draw data and information from is not influenced by us alone, of course, but by the zillions of millions of images from databases such as Shuttershock or Getty Images they are granted access to, and from our subsequent choices of whose image on the four is the “correct” version, from which he learns how to to please us. Artificial intelligence did not make any choice, in fact, but just reflected the world that we wanted to teach as real and to please us. And actually does its job pretty good, imagining gaudy things starting with the little I shared: I couldn’t have done any better myself.

“Pandemic”

---

“pandemic”

Internet, again, is not at all as a realistic depiction of reality: the results that Google Images searches return are strongly conditioned by other algorithms that work into addressing results for commercial purposes, manipulated by other men, of course, while we everyday humans work hard at feeding social media with our glossy and unrealistic photos. However, imagine how being able to influence these results turns out into an extraordinarily powerful political and propaganda weapon.

Both language and its representation of reality are the first and most immediate instruments of control of a more and more overpopulatedd and thereby centripetal human culture, rippling in a million of niches and subcultures that cannot be defined as minorities for sheer numeric prejudice. And to which, for better or for worse, internet has given voice and strength. And the more the niches and the cultures, the more humanity gets hard to control.

“Tradition”

---

“Tradition”. Yes, surely Midjourney made millions of miles of improvement, yet it looks like it’s trying to please the viewer with lots of details.

It is by digging into the more tribal archetypes, those on which our small veil of firstworldist glaze has no grip, that it is more strongly evident how language and its representation are so incredibly powerful: who decided that a successful man is a white, middle-aged man in a suit and tie, or that beauty means female youth and caucasian cheekbones? Our brain works primarily gathering and associating archetypes and stereotypes together, of course: they are the meters of the world we use from an early age to understand the world that surrounds us. If in the joke “tradition is peer pressure from dead people” lies a grain of truth, what the contemporary philosopher Byung-Chul Han — not without a bit of Luddism — states can be considered true as well: “rites objectified the world, structure a relationship with the world” and that, in good analysis, they are a valuable tool for us.

“Hunt”

---

“hunt”: the hunter with the same head as the prey is beautiful. Two parts Neil Gaiman, one of Little Red Riding Hood, a splash of NRA and serve stirred with no ice. 2024? Same concept, same mixture.

“The Hard People” by Patrick Heady is hard to find , and it also costs quite some money.

But it is an absolutely delightful read. It is the result of the research of an anthropologist who spent two years in the Ovaro valley, in Carnia — the alpine valley in which my mother was born, so to speak — studying the rites and traditions of our valleys with the same judgement parameters he would have used with a lost tribe of the Amazon.
And he is adorably merciless in exposing how the ancestral patterns of a first world population are not so distant from those of our own kind in other parts of the globe.
The narration changes, but the atavistic principles of “much / little”, “we / them”, “curse / bless”, underneath, are so ancient that they all look a little alike. Almost nature, not nurture, we could maybe venture.

“Us and them”

---

“us and them”, from a clumsy Emmerich movie poster to an all-american 50’s white couple with flags

Those able to manipulate language are powerful enough to manipulate ideas too: language shifts over the Overton Window — what is morally and politicaly acceptable and what is wrong. Accepting linguistic changes actually mean, as a matter of fact, allowing reality to be manipulating, acknowledging the power of the spell itself.

“Fear”

---

“fear” maybe reflects the archetipical “fear of getting out of a cave” of our species?

The same language that underlies and contains a cultural heritage also underlies and implicitly contains a divisive political and social tension.

And artificial intelligence describes our modern tribes, and the transformations of our society, with a disenchanted yet analytical gaze, learning to please us — human apes — with the stories we feed it with, until it will learn how to find its own grammar and narrative.

“Heaven”

---

First of all, I will continue building my company to outlive me. More importantly, I want our work ethics , based on fairness, inclusivity, respect, adequate salaries, and #sustainability, to positively influence other companies of any kind. Technology, vision, purpose, and knowledge provide us with the tools to finally move beyond the era where muscular, life-depriving, consumeristic work ethics were the dominant mentality.

1) We aim to do our part to leave a better world behind us. This includes respecting our workers’ physical and mental health, creating inclusive, accessible products, using carbon-neutral technologies to develop our work, and being fair to the people we work for while being honest with their users. As small as we may be, we take full responsibility for the consequences of our actions.

2) The toxic #consumerist culture of “it’s for tomorrow” exists because we allow it. 90% of problems and burnouts occur due to meaningless deadlines.

3) If you want to work with us, it’s about how you work, not who you are: you can be a mother, a migrant, straight, queer, asexual, anyone. The only thing we will judge is the quality of your work.

4) Working 24/7 is merely a consequence of poor project management and is highly discouraged in our company, where everyone stops at 17:00 no matter what.

5) There are no bosses, no rockstars, no egos in the office. I consult my workers all the time before making decisions: that’s realism. My mantra is asking, “Is what I’m saying making any sense?”

6) We pay for our workers’ education, or we provide it during regular working hours: asking your employees to study in their personal time for your own profit is evil.

7) We don’t have a “company WhatsApp group” because it “kinda feels faster”. We use Slack, and our workers are not allowed to use it outside of working hours. If you have a WhatsApp group with your workers, you’re invading their time.

8 ) We avoid fake team-building corporate happiness nonsense like the plague: when we thought about having a pre-Christmas lunch (lunch, not dinner, because you surely have relatives or friends you prefer more than us), we held an anonymous poll on Slack. Enjoy your time as you wish, you’ve well earned it.

9) We protect our workers’ privacy. We fired a very famous customer when we discovered he was trying to contact one of our workers to get things done “without telling us”.

10) I might be the most important asset of my company. I surely am its highest point of failure.
Always seek advice from people better than you. It can only improve things.

Where do I see myself in ten years from now? I honestly hope that by then, Ensoul will have a far better CEO than me and I will still be part of it in a different role. If your grand plan is just being THE BOSS, your dreams look pretty childish to me.

It’s our time to shape the future and to make this world a healthier place.

First and foremost, this is not science. I’m not trying to convince you about any specific theory. I’m not a nutritionist. It’s about my experience and just my opinion.

Clearing that up, let’s start with a little bit of history.

When I was a kid, sometimes my parents tried to feed me a spoonful of coffee, just to let me taste it. It was bitter and tasted like licking an ashtray. In fact, it tasted really, really awful. For a long phase of my life — about 35 years — I never ever drank coffee, sometimes feeling a little bit left out during social breaks at work (I didn’t smoke either — how disdainful of me).

Flash forward to late 2006: I’m somewhere near Canoa Quebrada, on the coasts of Cearà, Brazil. My friend Filippo Giunta and his family invite me on a buggy trip in the desert. After the dreamy, exciting promenade, we end up at an outdoor restaurant. Somebody tells me “you should try picanha, it’s really good meat”. I try it and yes, it is.

No, I’m lying: it tasted like

“OH MY GOSH” I scream in excitement “IT’S THE BEST MEAT EVER!!!!111!!” as I start guzzling more and more steaks.

The waiter looks paternally at me and muses: “Would you like some coffee as well?”

I slap my hand on the table, the ecstasy of the red meat hormones jumping in my brain: I scream “YES! YES! YES!” (hint: I was so excited at that point I would have probably accepted drinking a gallon of Tide too).

So I slowly started drinking coffee.

It became a subtle habit: in my junk food days, I used to drink up to 6 liters of bottled, sugary tea, and my weight ballooned to 116kg. I was a living ball of saccharine. I detoxed from my habits and got back down to 79kg, but coffee remained in the picture. It’s innocent: I just take one or two per day and it doesn’t seem to impact my metabolism. Or at least, that’s what it seems like.

Or at least, it doesn’t seems like.

We move to 2015; my soon-to-be wife teaches me this great truth: sugared coffee is not coffee — it’s another drink. And it’s true: I force myself to drink sugarless coffee — it’s even more bitter and strong — and I don’t like bitter tastes, but yes, I can sense the difference between a good and a bad coffee. It doesn’t just taste the same.

Or so I think.

2022 has not been a good year for most of us, too. Crisis, war, inflation, pandemics — there hasn’t been a good news day. I always woke up miserable, sometimes at 5am, mumbling, grumbling, doomscrolling, PS5ing, project-managing until breakfast. Sure, it wasn’t the best time to be jolly, lalalalalalala, but I really felt miserable, dragging myself around like a grumpy zombie. At the office, I drink one, two, or even three coffees in a row, totaling five coffees a day. I tell myself that it doesn’t affect my mood, but the truth is that my sleep patterns are disrupted and I blame it on the stress.

And stressed I was, sure enough, but.

So I tried giving up coffee. I just drank too much of it. Surprise, I soon felt better. I’m not talking about some crazy “Saint Paul on the road to Damascus” epiphany thing, but somehow my mood became rapidly lighter.

The first few days without coffee were complicated at breakfast: no coffee means you have to drink something else instead. I decided to just rehydrate with some water, and it felt perfectly fine. I felt like when you fast a bit after you ate too much: definitely healthier.

So I discovered my truth: coffee is some sexy son of a bitch. Coffee is not giving you any energy at all. Coffee just squeezes all the energy you have in your body and pushes it outside in a short time, then you are tired again, and you need coffee for another blast. It’s not giving you some magic spell to cast away all dangers in life with a rush of caffeine: it’s just a catalyst for your energy.

W. sips some wine and tells me: “when I’m depressed or angry, coffee just makes it worse”.

Let’s get back to my example: I woke up at 4am after 3.5 hours of sleep — I usually go to sleep after my Wordle, Quordle and Octordle routine just after midnight. I was awake for one hour, got back to sleep, and woke up at work time in the middle of another 3-hour cycle of sleep. Caffeine came at 7am and then I was fully proficient and blasted to prepare work for my collaborators — again, I’m (also) the project manager in my company. By the time we had our usual 10-minute kickoff meeting, caffeine was going down already and I started to feel tired. After all, I didn’t sleep much and of course there is some nuisance at work — we’re a pretty nice company, but it just happens. So at 9:30, my energy wass already drained down and I took another coffee that squeezed out my remaining energies up until noon, where I’m back tired and hungry. I had my meal with a coffee, felt even more tired and lazy, and there we go again until 4:00, when I took my last one.

Now I guess you can see my pattern too. And start to understand why I felt miserable all the time.

If you made it to this point in the article, you are probably wondering if I found some magic recipe to avoid coffee. The answer is — no, I didn’t. I didn’t even try, actually, because my body just tells me I don’t even need to.

I sleep a lot better at night — even during stressful periods — the end of the year is usually very stressful for entrepreneurs like me, but cases where I wake up at 4am are becoming more rare. I don’t feel like I am miserable and drained of energy like before because — in fact — I am not. I feel much more vital and happy now.

Please, don’t even think for a second that I’m labeling coffee as the devil. I’m not blaming coffee — I’m blaming myself.
I still like coffee — rarely, but I still drink it — but being espresso-dependent is not so different from any other dependency. It’s still more socially accepted than cocaine (is it?) but, in my opinion, it has to be used sparingly, perhaps for its sheer taste. Maybe we need to appreciate it more, and learn to distinguish its rich flavors, and not just guzzle a generic “COFFEE” we know nothing about: nobody would ever go into a winery and order just “WINE”. We don’t do it with wine, we should show some real love for coffee too.

Let’s face it, our previous humorous website worked out pretty good.

It was a work of tasteful copyrighting, instead of the usual sheer muscular dev technique and spinning thingamajigs; just two hours of code + irony turned out into a +25% higher turnover in just one year. Not bad at all for a landing page.
But no matter how funny and unconventional it happened to be, it just couldn’t last forever: even the most beautiful jokes, repeated a hundred times, soon become boring and worn out.

Context

2020 and 2021 have seen us growing, in aggregate, by 40% in turnover and by 60% in personnel. Our new customers no longer look at all like our old ones: our tone of voice, a little reluctantly, had to change — it’s okay to be funny and unconventional, but it’s easy to be confused with being a fully-fledged loon by those who simply don’t know you and your sense of humour. In fact, those who’ve already had the chance to work with us know how committed, serious and accurate we are. It’s not all about jokes.

The first sprout of the new site emerged during the hardest days of the first pandemic wave: job requests multiplied — especially e-commerce — but potential customers reacted with a smirk when our partners sent them over the link to our website: “ok, that’s funny-ha-ha, but it doesn’t looks like a serious agency, are they?” was the average reaction.
Our “official” site was by now cringe material, looking like a thermo-hydraulic engineering firm. Kinda aged pretty badly.

On March 10, 2021, OVH hands me over my birthday present one day in advance: most of our customers’ servers burn down in a gigantic arson event in their Strasbourg data center, including our own website and server. Candles were enough, guys, there was no need to go big. I took this as a sign: procrastination time is over.

April 2021

By the end of April, in one of the first post-pandemic “in-person” meetings in the office, I meet with Elena, our art director, and Matteo, our most skilled frontend, to share my ideas. Two weeks later Elena returns to the lab with a very nice and modern looking layout, a flamboyant typography dancing with curtains.js in the usual WordPress + Barba.js plexus: i’m not satisfied though. As beautiful and modern as it was, it’s not the right direction. Heck, it’s not their fault.

The naked truth: it’s our fault. A beautiful website surely needs nice copy, beautiful images, beautiful videos too. Do we have any? No way José. Not a single frame.
Like most dev agencies, we kinda cheat: we base our entire looks out of our customers’ creativity: yet we are not Moroso sofas, nor the BAM park. Indeed what we could display of our work would be quite dull for the non-nerd public.
I grumble and mumble, until I realize that animation, user interaction and user experience are probably the only parts of our work that are immediately clear to the general public. Videos of our sites, in a nutshell, not jpgs. And I hardly saw this anywhere: awkward, right? Just big colorful ambitious jpgs, a few funny gifs, that’s enough. Video. I scribble down on a note.

May 2021

Meanwhile, I begin to nail down what I DO NOT want on our site.

• most mobile sites suck big time. The mobile version of very popular, award-winning desktop sites is a messy, endless strip of chaotic, unreadable content. Doomscrolling material.
  Not responsive yet “squidgy”; meaningful stuff crammed into tiny space, while the computer CPU blows like a sick dragon and runs the mobile phone as with the torch on, consuming the equivalent of a pre-war Soviet power plant to animate photographs for a sheer quirk. Our beloved WWW, folks, consumes a lot of energy, and therefore pollutes.
• Customer Names: I keep thinking about it, front page “logo wall” names make me sick. It’s a very, very easy way to declare your pedigree, sure, but it looks to me like someone wanting to qualify as a partner, sends you pictures of other lovers they had before you.
  I’m kidding, of course, yet you’ll probably agree a little bit with me. If client names have to be there, it really has to be meaningful for the explanation of a super nice project — they don’t have to look like stuffed hunting trophies hung on the wall. It makes perfect sense only if you solve someone’s problem in your own productive context and exemplify it.
• We will NOT have the terrible “staff page with funny photos” on the agency website. Maybe with excessive severity I call it “the obituary page”: staff forced into reluctant grins, maybe hating each other guts.
  If there really really really has to be our such pictures on the site, let’s not do it like that.
• Texts, texts, texts: all sites have intimidating oceans of text. Motivational text. Pseudo-newage-babble-text. Slogans nobody really asked for. I want to check the way you and your team work, you answer me back with poems about moths. I ask you what services you might be providing and you answer back with a quote from Pepe Mujica.
  I can easily picture myself standing in the middle of my flooded house, calling the plumber and he answers me back with a haiku. Maybe it’s one of the reasons we are looking more and more for answers and relevant information in chats and social networks. THIS THING IS LEADING ME SOMEWHERE. WRITE IT DOWN.

June 2021

I ask Matteo to try to simulate a chat system. The idea is to have some kind of chatbot. Matteo writes from scratch a mini javascript framework that seems to work pretty well too, with multiple answers to the same questions. I play with it for a couple of weeks: technically beautiful as it may be, turns out to be a dramatically cold answering-machine experience. I can imagine a user eager to understand what we do in a few clicks and forced to spend 15 minutes fighting his way around my poor humor crammed into boring bubbles before landing into a proper search result. People gets bored fast. The idea of the chatbot in itself is not bad, but it must be simplified, contextualized. Elena’s-infinite-patience finds a similar reference but its style is definitely too brutalist for my likes.

My co-founder Giulio looks puzzled, yet he remembers his intention to make a dev game, a game where you play as a web developer. As a good egotist, I raise the bar: not just the game of managing a freelancer, but an entire agency. The perfect example is Toggl’s Unicorn Startup Simulator.

I stare at its interface, its page placement, and I ruminate, and ruminate.
Are we bold enough to try such a provocation? A mobile only site?

July 2021

We trial the reduced form and it makes the chat look pretty neat and more polished, but when the desktop modals widen to full screen the result is messy. When we try to put a fullscreen video as a background to the chat the result is even more dramatic. It turns into a site crammed with our customer’s creativity and interfaces underneath. As much as we try to make a minimal interface, all of our icons seems to overlap with our customers’ graphics, who obviously do not speak to each other.
Nope, nope, nope.
We throw away the fullscreen video. Olè.

And a text-only version of the interface = horrible boredom. I am the one who conceived it, i should be super excited about it. Nope. It is dull and boring.
I warn Matteo we will have to simplify the chat: it’s a pity, his code is brilliant. It’s a major downgrade: he reminds me that it will take him a day just to “clean up” the code a bit. He will be forced to go into cleansing routines many more times.

Visuals are still large fields of white with background dots. Engineering stuff again. No good. The more I remove, the more I feel like taking stuff out. Elena looks puzzled at this mess, torn between telling me “it doesn’t work” or “it doesn’t work”.

September 2021

Emojis are part of our cultural landscape for at least the last two decades. And so do icons. Using standard icons? Meh. I’d rather not use smileys and messenger-like icons, nuh-uh.
I recall a trip to Berlin, visiting the Humboldt-box Museum, whose wall were decorated with pictograms that looked like cavemen paintings. That looked so cool. Something that even a primitive man could easily recognize and find familiar, non-verbally. This is exactly my point when I involve Luca Malisan in the project: I have known Luca for years, since I was a thin graphic designer and he was a chubby programmer — now both roles and weights have reversed. Luca is an illustrator with a stunning portfolio (Dragonero, Bonelli, Glenàt and a thousand more) and a spectacular 3D designer too: we recently encouraged him to work in three.js. But here we don’t need three.js — it weighs too much, in terms of sheer performance and too much for just an icon.

The scroll in the first screen is too short, so we can’t use GSAP’s Scrolltrigger to activate icons when we scroll: we decide that — on mobile — the animation will run every few seconds despite the action. Yes, they look like I wanted them to look.

Texts take shape. They don’t have the disruptive humor of our old landing page but they are still trés Ensoul. We limit each video to 30 seconds and give people time to read. We put put a progress bar that looks like Instagram stories. It is a very popular User Interface model, why not after all.
Unlike Instagram, however, we leave them on the bottom, easier to click with one hand only.

Below we replicated the movable hamburger menu that we already made on Ghiti, but the more I look the more it seems to me to not be a very bold choice — like “hey look, I did a cool and innovative navigation BUT now I’m back to the ugly I know”. I tell the developers to remove it. [developer complaint intensifies]

Doubt spreads among the troops: “Fulvio no longer knows where he is going, he is spinning in circles”. It’s not true, but it’s not entirely false either: they are concerned for the company’s good and I know they are worried for a good reason, because they would like to see an end to this project. But this time it’s make or break; I can’t be satisfied with the usual tepid soup: I have to play with it, I have to make mistakes. We will lose whatever money we will lose.

October 2021

The videos: oh well, it’s where the shoe pinches, Romanin thinks. I am concerned but i don’t let my concern leak among the troops. We’ve been working for months on this site, we’ve come this far writing tens of thousands of lines of code, and we’re still in the middle of nowhere when it comes to the most important part of our content. I ask a couple of customers to send me their video reels but they seem dramatically borrowed, like the pictures you purchase with the frame.
I finally decide that the videos will be animations from our works. Luckily, we’re pretty good at animations and it’s easy to find out relevant material. The problem is finding out the best way to capture it — we have to understand how to have a smooth scroll, avoiding the feeling that the screen is being dragged by a tractor.
Luckily Matteo has a top hat overflowing with rabbits and invents this code snippet I gladly share with you.

var gsapScript = document.createElement(‘script’);
gsapScript.type = ‘text/javascript’;
gsapScript.src = ‘https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/combine/npm/gsap@3.7.1,npm/gsap@3.8.0/dist/ScrollToPlugin.min.js’;
gsapScript.onload = () => {
gsap.to(window, { scrollTo: { y: document.body.offsetHeight }, duration: 15, delay: 2, ease: ‘linear’ })
}
document.head.appendChild(gsapScript);

These few lines of code, pasted into the Chrome console, scroll the screen with a constant motion (and adjustable speed).
I spend two days straight recording and cutting videos.

Sure, videos: but how? Choices, choices.
Fullscreen, no way. Heavy, chunky, it would be needed in two formats at least.
Horizontal videos = very small on mobile.
Vertical videos = intrusive on desktop.

Square: square is a good choice. Tall enough to be readable on mobile, and taking only half the screen only in desktop, while the chat is still centered. It’s a good compromise: we add some shadow to the chat bubbles which definitely makes them definitely pop out. We do some testing by dragging the progress bars around, yet we decide to leave it in the middle, so that it minimizes the junction between the video and the text on its side.
We find a fallback: video will always be square — if the monitor is really big, video will still be square.

We also start working on the gestures: tap to stop the scroll, swipe to proceed to the next video. Mobile-wise it definitely feels great.

I’m starting to think that yeah, so far so good, but there has to be an English version too. Ok, I ask Matteo to implement a second language [developer grumble intensifies] and I translate the text. But where do I put the language switch now? *sigh*

November 2021

It is November 5 and I am at the états généraux of the Friulian language. I am are there because Ensoul has ARLeF, the regional agency for the Friulian language, among its customers and has worked on the beautiful Ghiti project to encourage bilingualism in children. We are strong believers in creating context to bring the Friulian language more and more into information technologies and we —

-I find facepalming myself in the middle of the convention: sure, that’s so considerate to translate your site in English, Romanin, but at this point, why not also Friulian?
I ask my old musical comrade Ferdinando Passone, former Passion of DLH posse, MC in my old hip hop band to translate all the text — the game alone is 1400 lines of translation —into a Friulian that’s more decent than mine.

Two problems start to emerge: the full-white colors are no good and the icons are beautiful but they lack something, but most of all the absence of a place to put the language selector is pretty serious. Adding it at this point is almost impossible. We need some sort of splash page, we need at least an image there. The dog chases its own tail: we don’t have an ad hoc image to put there.

Code must be cleaned again, colors are missing, the picture is missing; I’m starting to think too that this site will never come to life. And I wanted to publish it before Christmas. Sheesh.
The deus ex machina thunders from Olympus and his name is Francesco Marongiu. I have known Francesco by fame for a decade, but I have never had the opportunity to work with him. He is a highly-rated fashion photographer — he has created the new image of Inter with Nike, so to speak, together with those beautiful people of The Solo House, and when I tell him, not without a hint of melancholy, where we are knee-deep in the creativemud, I distinctly hear a noise of jet turbine starting. Over the years I have had the pleasure of working with many nationally and internationally renowned professionals, but this it is the first time that I am literally overwhelmed by the sheer amount of ideas and suggestions he sends me: for the first time in my life I have to say “no, wait, less, let me think about it, I have to digest everything you sent me”. Among the dozens of inputs he sends me, one sparks a light in my head:

it’s a beautiful reference by James Turrell. My head flips the “screen” in the background into the shape of our smartphone. An huge CLICK! writing comes out of my head in 96-point bold Bodoni. Here’s the catch!
I start to work on colors, and pink appears, and I am the one to choose it: years ago, if you had told me that my corporate website would have been pink, I would have laughed so hard. But it’s 2021 (pretty much 2022) now. I use the picture of a flower shot by Francesco to test the size of the image. It’s not bad, I start thinking. One of my collaborators’ wives passes behind his screen and tells him “what is that flower about, A GRAVE?”.
Ok, we definitely need a b plan.

Francesco drags me back into his whirlwind of ideas: while I discover how to make the icons more captivating and colorful by animating them in After Effects, he selects, fights, checks, finds the right model, does the styling, does a styling test of clothes on the model in photoshop to see in advance if it works. If he had to pedal to light up the room with a dynamo, he probably would have.

Giulio and Davide optimize the game: we are still working with the new colors to simplify the interface. The game is very funny. Trés Ensoul. Elena guides me to find the right colors, even for icons: no longer the alarming red but a very classy petrol blue. We will use our faces in the game — yes, it makes sense to see them.

Only the cover photo is missing at this point.

December 2021

8 december. Shooting time! I gather the entire agency team where we will shoot the photographs.

Boomer alert: for the first time I really feel like the CEO of a marketing agency. I self-slap myself hard: feet back on the ground, Romanin. You are a web developer. You may have thought of the concept of the model mirroring herself into technology with Francesco, sure, but breathe back slowly. You’re a developer.

The shooting turns out to be big fun, the model and the MUA are really good, and Francesco also does his utmost to create light painting experiments (available in NFT for those who might be interested). Within a few hours Francesco sends me the pictures. My wife sees me smiling for the first time since our wedding.

We do the tests, I’m happy: launch is confirmed on December 15th.
It is Friday 10 December when Francesco writes to me “listen, but is it ok that the videos are not working on iPhone?”.

We haven’t done enough debugging. No, to be honest; we hadn’t really tried it on the iPhone once until then. Madness. A thousand nightmares crowd my round head: it is very likely that the whole video system that we have concocted in recent months may not work on the iPhone, which has much tighter security policies on the topic. A whole site suddenly mute on iPhone. “This site looks better on mobile, BUT NOT ON IPHONE”.
Well yes, it seems to me an excellent business card for international agencies.

I spend a weekend ruminating and grumbling: on Monday morning at the kickoff Matteo just says “ouch!”. And I cry bitter tears. After an hour he writes on Slack: he punched the site like Fonzie and now it works flawlessly on iPhone too.
“YA DON’T SAY?” I say, quoting Steve Jobs.
For real, yes. We even find the time to implement dark mode at the last minute, and to spend two days of development on Lighthouse and nginx to improve its performance until it works fine on a Alcatel phone built in 1918.

After the publication, when I get the first compliments, the first offers of microcorrection to the furlan texts, and everything starts to work, I look for a moment at the mountain of work we have climbed, with all the beautiful people who have helped us and contributed to the project (hello Beatrice Peterchiutto, Manuel Maggio, Andrea Zini, the boys from Mabiloft and Belka, the always magical Nama). Maybe we won’t win no award, yet the feeling of having built something outside the box is there, and I can only be grateful to everyone. It’s a newer, truer picture of what we have become and what we want to become. From here, finally, I see the future I want.

Fun fact — we won six awards — Honorable Mention from Awwwards, Site of the Week on Digital Design Awards, Special Kudos from CSSDA with three further awards for UX, UI and Innovation.