The black bar across my surname

The first new home page I liked had a thick black bar running straight through my surname.

It looked bold. It also cut "Azzaretto" in half. On a site whose whole point is my name, that's a strange choice.

I threw it away.

Where I started

The site had been online for a day. Then I rebuilt it from scratch, with a completely different look.

The home page became a lab bench. Every section is an instrument, and the projects sit inside a radio tuner: turn the knob, lock onto a station, open the project.

So what? The projects aren't a list you scroll past. You have to tune in.

On top of that, a touch of brutalism: thick borders, hard shadows, slightly crooked boxes, huge titles.

How I worked

All of this happened on a separate Git branch. A branch is a parallel copy of the project: I can break things there while the real site stays untouched.

So what? I could try an idea, look at it, and keep only the pieces that worked. Before merging everything back, I created a safety tag on the old version: a bookmark I can return to with one command.

Most decisions came from choosing between alternatives, not from getting it right the first time:

• three versions of the hero, the opening section with my name;
• three footers, and the winner is a "water line": a dark block with a jagged top edge, my nod to water polo;
• three font pairs for the new Projects page, an index with enormous project names.

New look, built on a branch, picked from alternatives, with a way back.

What I threw away

The black bar wasn't the only casualty.

The first project cards had a white background, rounded corners, a shadow and a coloured stripe on the side. They looked like a Trello board, a tool for managing tasks, not a personal site. Gone.

Then there was an orange border that lit up around the big boxes whenever the mouse passed over them. Gone too.

Every removal followed the same chain: I see it on screen → something feels off → I name what's off → it goes.

What's new

• An About page with my introduction, in English and Italian.
• A public address, ciao@alessandroazzaretto.com, set up with Cloudflare Email Routing. It forwards messages to my inbox without showing it.
• A small "Available" box fixed in the bottom right corner, which takes you straight to the contacts.
• The diary, now a timeline.

So what about the email? Anyone can write to me, and my personal address stays private.

The diary is the change I care about most. The /articolo command now adds each new article to the timeline on its own, and once there are more than five, it creates an archive page.

So what? Publishing an article no longer means editing a pile of files by hand. Less friction → I write more often → the site does its job.

What I learned

Making three versions and picking one is faster than trying to get one perfect. You only see the difference when they sit side by side.

And a branch plus a tag takes the fear out of experimenting. If I ruin something, I go back.

Next step

Two more articles, and the diary gets its archive.

The bar looked bold. The name was the point. The name stays.