Zen garden in a duotone version

Sam Laurin

Graphic and Web Design | Montreal QC

CSS Zen Garden

mobile friendly mockup of my own design of CSS Zen Garden

CSS Zen Garden is a pretty well known challenge for designers. It gives everyone all the sme content in HTML, but it's up to me to make something with it. To make things interesting, I had to choose a subject from a hat and reflect that in my design. I got hope. At first, I had no idea how to recreate hope in a design. I thought about Pandora's Box, but I could never come out with a design I liked.

Finally, thanks to a humanities class I was taking, I had my theme. In a poem by Linton Kwezi Johnson, the firefly is used as a symbol of hope! I'll always remember this project because it was also the first time I tried to create a minimalist design. It was very different from anything I had done up to that point, and honestly, it was a little scary.