Immersive web experiences that go beyond templates — interactive desktops, draggable UIs, and experimental browser applications.
An architecture firm wanted a portfolio website that felt as intentional and crafted as the buildings they designed. They had been through three redesigns with agencies that delivered polished but generic template-based sites — the kind where you swap logos and copy and get the same result for a law firm or a bakery. They wanted something that made visitors stop scrolling, something that architects and design-conscious clients would remember and share. The brief was deliberately open-ended: "Make it feel like stepping into one of our buildings."
The technical constraints made the creative ambitions harder to realize. The site needed to be fast (sub-2-second load on 4G connections), accessible (WCAG AA compliant), and SEO-friendly (architecture firms live and die by local search rankings). Interactive experiences often sacrifice all three — heavy WebGL scenes tank performance, custom navigation patterns break screen readers, and client-rendered content is invisible to crawlers. We needed to find the intersection of impressive and responsible.
The content volume was also significant: 48 projects spanning residential, commercial, and public buildings, each with 10-30 high-resolution photographs, floor plans, and descriptive text. The site needed a project browsing experience that could handle this volume without feeling overwhelming, and individual project pages that gave each building the visual space it deserved.
We designed the site around a spatial metaphor — navigating the portfolio felt like walking through a gallery. The homepage featured a full-viewport project carousel with parallax depth layers, where foreground elements moved at a different rate than background textures, creating a subtle 3D effect without WebGL. Each project card used CSS transforms and intersection observers to animate in as the user scrolled, with staggered timing that gave the page a choreographed, intentional feel.
For the project browser, we built a custom masonry grid with client-side filtering by category, year, and scale. The filtering used FLIP animations (First, Last, Invert, Play) so that projects didn't just appear and disappear but smoothly rearranged themselves — items sliding into new positions while filtered-out items faded and collapsed. Individual project pages used a full-bleed image gallery with gesture support: swipe on mobile, keyboard navigation on desktop, and a lightbox mode with high-resolution zoom.
Performance was achieved through aggressive optimization. Images were served through a custom pipeline that generated multiple resolutions and formats (WebP, AVIF, fallback JPEG) at build time, with blur-hash placeholders shown during loading. The entire site was statically generated with Next.js, with only the interactive components hydrated on the client. We achieved a Lighthouse performance score of 96 on the homepage and 98 on project pages, while keeping the fully interactive experience intact. Accessibility was built in from the start: semantic HTML, ARIA labels on custom controls, focus management for the lightbox, and reduced-motion alternatives for every animation.
Week 1-2 was discovery and design direction with mood boards and interactive prototypes. Weeks 3-5 covered the core framework, image pipeline, and CMS integration. Weeks 6-8 focused on animations, the project browser, and gallery components. Weeks 9-10 were accessibility audits, performance optimization, and cross-browser testing. Weeks 11-12 were content migration (all 48 projects), client review, and launch preparation.
We build systems like this for teams worldwide. Tell us your idea and we will make it real.