2026-11-04

I wanted to move the book cover myself

I’d been wanting to try this for a while. If I’m working on a page and I want something to move a little, why can’t I just grab it and put it where I want it?

I was putting Frankenstein on the Bargar Art homepage. The cover looked pretty good where it was. I still wanted to see what would happen if I moved it myself. So we made a version of the page where I could drag the cover around and nudge it a pixel at a time.

I got it to a spot I liked with the window maximized. Then I narrowed the window and it felt a little too far to the right. I narrowed it some more and it looked good again. I thought I was making one decision about where the cover should go. I hadn’t really considered how many different relationships I was looking at as the page changed.

Wide homepage feature, with the large Frankenstein title reaching toward the tilted cover. — At full width, I was looking at the end of the word *Frankenstein* when I put the cover where I liked it.

At full width, the title was the thing that reached out toward the cover. As the title got smaller, I started looking at the end of the description instead. For a while that meant I was looking at the word “with.” Then “with” went onto the next line, and all of a sudden the space felt different.

Narrower homepage feature. The word with has moved to the second line and there is more visible space between the description and cover. — Just after the description wraps. I still liked it, but if I were moving the cover by hand here, I’d pull it a little to the left.

There was a narrower desktop width where I really liked it again. The text and the cover felt like they belonged together. On mobile they stack, so I’m looking at something else entirely. Even there, the little tilt makes the cover look a hair left of center to me.

Narrow desktop feature just before the mobile layout, with the text and tilted cover close together. — Near the narrow end of desktop, the text and cover felt like one piece again.

I didn’t want to sit there putting the cover in place at every possible width. I wanted to put it where I liked it once and see if the page could carry that feeling with it. We tried another version, and when I narrowed the window this time, the cover felt a lot more like it was moving with the text. It’s good enough that I wanted to put it on the site.

Then I proofread this post. I got to that last screenshot and thought, yeah, the text and the cover look like one thing. Then I looked at the space on either side of that one thing. It was a little too far right. So now I was back on the homepage moving the book cover again.

I kept making the window narrower and wider. One width looked good. A little narrower and the cover felt too far right. Then it looked good again, and I’d try to find the bad spot and suddenly I couldn’t. At some point this went from a fun experiment to me trying to remember exactly where I’d been annoyed by a gap.

I’d wanted to put the cover in one place and have the page figure out the rest. In the end I showed it two places near the narrow end of desktop that felt right to me, and we made it move between those. Then I maximized the window and asked for one last nudge to the right. Ten pixels. On my MacBook Air. I laughed when I heard that number. Everybody else is going to open the site on whatever screen they have.

I still like how it moves. I looked at that last version and finally said, just publish it. I’d been trying to move a book cover, and by then I really wanted to make a coffee and get in the bath.