UI Design

Nóstos

Riccardo Maisano • 2020 – 2022

A marble statue of Ulysses with his dog on a cream background, the name Nóstos written across it in orange brush lettering.

The challenge

An open website where students could read the Odyssey, canto by canto, in a new Italian translation with the translator's own commentary.

Nóstos is the Greek word for the return home — the theme of the Odyssey and the name Riccardo Maisano chose for his translation. Riccardo (Naples, 1947), my father, taught Byzantine philology, humanist literature and New Testament philology from 1969 to 2017 at the universities of Salerno, Calabria and Naples "L'Orientale". After retiring he set out to translate all twenty-four cantos of the Odyssey and to comment on them.

His translation has one rule: keep the rhythm. Homer's Greek is in dactylic hexameter, a line built on a long-short-short beat, and the Italian was written to be read aloud with that same cadence, so the poem keeps its pace and its emotion instead of becoming prose. The site had to respect that: every verse on its own line, numbered, with the commentary within reach.

The brief was simple and open: a free website, with no login and no paywall, where a student could open Canto IX and read it on a phone during a commute, and where the translator could publish, correct and add on his own as the work progressed over two years.

Sector
Literature — open website
Duration
2020 – 2022
Team
With Riccardo Maisano, translator
Tools
Figma, Photoshop, Illustrator, WordPress
The list of cantos VII to XXII in large serif capitals on cream; hovering Canto XVII turns it orange and reveals a photo of a dark dog looking up.

My role

  • Visual identity and art direction
  • Website design and content layout
  • WordPress setup for self-publishing

Translation and commentary by Riccardo Maisano.

The Nóstos home page on a phone: the marble statue with the name in orange brush lettering and the line 'Un progetto di Riccardo Maisano'.
A canto page on a phone: a photo of a fallen leaf, the verse range 261 – 405, the subtitle 'Al gran palazzo di Circe, valente maestra di droghe' and the verses below.
The Nóstos home page: the statue of Ulysses with his dog on cream, the name written across it in orange, the menu Canti I – XII, Canti XIII – XXIV, Blog, Il progetto.
Close-up photograph of a marble head with curly hair and beard, eyes and open mouth in strong light and shadow — the face that inspired the logo.

The result

A cream and orange site built on Playfair Display and Karla, with the twenty-four cantos as its backbone: two indexes, one per half of the poem, each canto with its subtitle, verse numbers and the translator's notes, plus a blog for the stories around the work.

One problem showed up on phones. The verses were set justified, and on a narrow screen the longer lines wrapped and the spacing opened into gaps that broke the rhythm we were trying to keep. My father and I went through the formatting together and solved it with fluid type: the font size is tied to the screen width (a CSS clamp() between a minimum and a maximum, in viewport units), so the text shrinks smoothly from desktop to mobile and each verse stays on its own line.

A laptop showing the full index of the twenty-four cantos in serif type, Canto XXII highlighted in orange with a stormy-sky photo.
The cover of the book: Omero, Odissea, introduzione, traduzione con testo originale a fronte e note, a cura di Riccardo Maisano, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura.

Epilogue

The site was taken offline when the translation found its final form: in 2025 Riccardo Maisano published the complete Odyssey — introduction, translation with the Greek text facing, and notes — with Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, in the Pleiadi series. Nóstos had done its job: it carried the work, and its readers, to the book.