About
This website closer resembles a big and rather imperfect Venn diagram rather than a portfolio site. You can expect to find a mix of things, including services I offer, events I run, and thing I'm working on. I update it as often as I can to reflect the flow of my current practice. There will probably be some design tweaks here and there as I update it.
Technical
I built this website myself. Its code lives on GitHub. It's built with 11ty and deployed by Netlify. Early in the process, I forked its foundations from an 11ty template, although the current site and backend look nothing like the template.
The design was drafted directly on the webpage using VS Code. Pages are written either in Nunjucks or Markdown. My domain francescoimola.com is registered with Hover.
This website was previously two websites, I used to have a container for everything business-related (called nevernotready), and one for everything else. I have since recognised the value of my multidisciplnary practice and have "re-owned" my name as my brand. This led to a redesig of this website that now accomodates more of what I do and have to share.
AI use
To improve accessibility, reliability of the code, troubleshooting and copy-editing, I occasionally use Claude by Anthropic. I started using Claude as part of the process when I rebuilt this site in the summer of 2025, as hiring people to speed up production, test for bugs, or edit my content wasn't (and still isn't) a financially realistic option for me. That said, all final decisions have always been made by a flesh and bones human, i.e., me.
I am aware that using large language models carries a carbon footprint. Even though I could argue that francescoimola.com is built and maintained by a one-person team, and to some extent AI acts as my assistant—"saving energy" by cutting down on time spent fixing things or making me more productive—I don't want to justify my actions with that argument. And while this site’s code is top-class in terms of efficiency and weight, I acknowledge that such measures won't erase the environmental cost of using generative AI in the first place.
Analytics and tracking
Trying to browse the internet without having to hand over your personal data is pretty much impossible these days. Most businesses see the £0 price tag that Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel come with and don't blink once before setting either or both of them up. Yet they don't realise it takes a lot of infrastructure and energy to track and store data. Some don't think about how they collect, use and share their customers' data in the first place. Which explains why unethical, resource-hungry tracking scripts have become so pervasive.
As an industry, we marketers, designers and developers need to rethink priorities to put people and privacy first. If we can cut down on the number of tracking scripts we use on our websites, we can be more responsible about these things.
Personally, consumer trust is as important as the services I deliver. Which is why I've done absolutely everything to avoid using tracking scripts. The only data-gathering script that's active on this website is from Ahrefs Web Analytics, which helps me track technical SEO and site health. It's lightweight (2KB), cookie-free, and it DOES NOT collect personal data because it just aggregates behaviour without identifying users.
Explore the results from this site's privacy inspection.
Typography in use
Ronzino by Collletttivo is all over this website.
A new open-source spin on the cult-classic Arial, Ronzino improves on Arial's many drawbacks while retaining a similar information-driven feeling and staying nondescript. Collletttivo is a team of Italian designers, and I felt it was important to pay homage to my home country through typography, the core ingredient, the very fabric of any website, especially this.