From Sweden to the MOA Method

I arrived in Sweden without much of a shock: no life-change trauma, no immediate homesickness, just the fairly quick sense that things there were done in a way I didn’t yet recognise.

The first thing that struck me was the slowness, meant not as a lack of efficiency but as a shared choice: people took the time a task needed, without treating it as wasted time or something to shorten as much as possible. In the Swedish work culture I got to know, calm and attention came before rushing, even when that meant slowing down compared to what I’d previously considered normal. At first it felt almost counterintuitive, then I started noticing what that slowness actually produced: fewer mistakes, less work redone from scratch, fewer things handed in half-finished just to meet a deadline.

That’s where I trained as a web designer, in practice, on the job: watching how the people around me worked, what they considered important and how willing they were to wait rather than trade quality for speed. It was a real apprenticeship made of actual projects and mistakes made in the moment, not simulated in a classroom.

When I moved back to Perugia, I brought those values with me, not so much as theory to apply by rote but as a way of working I had already absorbed without fully realising it. That’s the path that led to what I privately started calling the MOA method.

It isn’t an official method. I didn’t study it in a manual or learn it in a course: it’s simply the name I eventually gave to the way I approach every project, once I noticed I kept following the same pattern.

Working calmly is only part of it, because the real point of MOA is seeing the whole before the individual pieces. When I start a website, I don’t begin with one isolated detail, such as a colour, a font or an animation, and build outward from there. Instead, I gather all the elements first, look carefully at each one and only then consider how they can come together into something larger. Moa, essentially, means just that: gathering, bringing together.

This way of working means resisting the urge to settle the most visible or most urgent piece straight away: a striking headline, a strong image, an eye-catching colour are all things that could be decided quickly and in isolation, but if they are chosen before looking at the whole, they risk producing a site that works in fragments without holding together as a structure. That’s why the MOA method goes the other way round, starting with the whole and only then moving to the detail that supports it.

Even today, when I begin a project, I start with this gathering phase. I look at what already exists, such as an old website, some photographs, copy written at different times or a still-vague sense of how the person wants to come across, and try to understand the relationships that can emerge between those elements before working on the individual details.

It isn’t a faster approach. It’s probably slower than what anyone in a hurry to get their site online would want, but it’s what I’ve come to consider the right way, after seeing what happens when this step gets skipped: pages that look stitched together from mismatched pieces, decisions made with no view of the whole, sites that technically work but don’t really hold up.

Sweden taught me that quality isn’t a matter of speed, and the MOA method is how I brought that lesson home, applying it every time I start a new project.