About

by Nørth is the practice of Joern Bargmann — a solo front-end developer based in Como, Italy, working from a shared studio just across the border in Balerna, Switzerland.

I studied photography in Nuremberg. Useful in its own right, but it also taught me something more lasting: how to look. At a grid. At negative space. At the way light hits a corner. At why one typeface feels right and another feels off by exactly enough to bother you.

In 2003, I decided to move to Italy for a year. I left my job at a photo studio, lined up a handful of remote clients — which, in 2003, before reliable broadband was a thing, was genuinely a small act of faith — loaded up a caravan, and drove south.

I spent a few weeks on a campsite while I figured out where to land. Milan was the obvious choice; Como was the better one. Smaller, easier to find your feet in, easier to actually meet people rather than just drift past them. I chose Como. Found an apartment, signed a contract I barely understood with the patient help of someone at a local agency who had clearly dealt with non-Italian-speaking arrivals before, and got to work.

The year passed. I stayed. My two children were born in Como in 2008 and 2010. At some point "living in Italy" stopped feeling like an adventure and started feeling like a life.

I work from a shared studio in Balerna, just across the Swiss border — Lake Como still very much my backyard, just with a Swiss address on the studio door.

The name by Nørth comes from that same geography, and a mild design obsession. I'm the northerner who ended up in the north of Italy — Como sits in the far north of the country, so somehow I still managed to be northern about it. The ø isn't a typo. It's a nod to the Nordic design sensibility I've always been drawn to: quiet, precise, built to last.

My photographer's eye is still the thing I'm most grateful for. It's what lets me look at a high-end design brief and understand what the designer is actually after — the weight of a particular detail, the rhythm in a layout, the reason a certain shade of grey matters. I find myself reading websites the way I once read buildings: breaking down the structure, understanding how it holds together, then working out how to build it properly in code.

The architect thing never quite left, either.