Squarespace Designer
I’m a Squarespace designer and developer in the San Diego area, a Circle Platinum expert and Authorized Trainer who has built on Squarespace since 2008. Today I put that design work into products and guides: skins for the Language Switch plugin and free tutorials for people designing their own sites.
Design for the visitor
A language switcher only works if a visitor finds it in a second. I design for the person who lands on a site in a language they don’t read and wants to switch quickly.
Design for the owner
Each Language Switch skin is a short piece of custom CSS with a PDF guide, so you can see exactly what you’re adding to your site and how to change it.
Skins
Pill + Globe, Pill and Square are three looks for the language dropdown, $7 each. Choose one skin per site. See them on the Language Switch page.
See the process
The articles walk through real Squarespace builds, free to read.
The Five Stages of Design.
This is the design-thinking process I follow for everything I publish: look at who it’s for, define the problem, try ideas, test a rough version, then polish it.
01. Empathize
Good design starts with understanding the person it’s for. For a multilingual site that means a visitor who may not read your main language at all, so I look at how they actually arrive and what they need first.
02. Define
I write the problem as one clear statement, such as “a visitor can switch language in one tap from any page.” A sentence like that keeps every later choice honest.
03. Ideate
Here I move from the problem to solutions. I sketch several approaches, like a plain dropdown, a flag list or a compact pill, before picking one.
04. Prototype
I build a rough version quickly and test it on a real Squarespace site. It’s cheap to change at this stage, so I try the idea against desktop, mobile and a few languages before committing.
05. Design
Last comes the polish: spacing, type, color and states. That’s where the finished skins come from, and why they hold up on both desktop and mobile.