Before I launched MicMage.com, I spent a couple of years messing around in the trenches of Google Sites.

It was actually pretty fun learning about all the stuff you couldn't do in their site builder, and then trying to figure out clever, inventive workarounds to bypass those limitations.

One of the absolute most annoying things I discovered about Google Sites was how it handled grid layouts on mobile screens.

If you built a section on desktop where an image sat on the right and text sat on the left, the engine wouldn't swap or stack them properly when scaled down to a phone screen. It was an absolute disaster for readability. You’d end up with text fields that looked completely disconnected from their subjects, or two images awkwardly stacking back-to-back while the text got buried underneath.

Back then, there was zero way to write an exclusive layout for mobile users. You were forced to align every single image to the left (or place them on top, if you wanted to be weird and boring) just so the mobile version wouldn't scramble the entire page into nonsense.

Now that I’m building on my own terms without those clunky constraints, I don't have to worry about such an odd obstacle.

For the Sketch8 gallery, I went ahead and built a cascading, alternating layout for the desktop view. Having the artwork Zig-Zag across the screen makes the page feel way more dynamic than just lining everything up in a rigid, vertical column like a spreadsheet.

I’m not even 100% sure where I originally got the instinct for that aesthetic. It’s almost certainly something I subconsciously stolen and remixed from an old GamePro magazine preview layout.

(Honestly, there are plenty of other visual elements scattered across the site that were pilfered from 90s gaming magazines, so I definitely wouldn't put it past me.)

It’s just another example of taking a piece of "battle damage" from a bad platform experience and turning it into a clean, custom design that actually has some personality.