Web / 2026 / Live
Nocturne
A single page concept site for a fictional design studio, built as a pure front-end craft piece. About 15 kB gzipped, and every effect in it is hand-written.
The exercise
Take the kind of motion-heavy studio site that normally arrives with a scroll library, an animation library and three hundred kilobytes of runtime, and build it without any of them.
What is in it
A preloader, a trailing cursor, masked line reveals, sticky stacking cards, a manifesto that lights as you scroll through it, and a count-up timeline. Light and dark themes that persist and default to whatever the operating system asked for.
Why it matters
Zero runtime dependencies and roughly 15 kB gzipped. Writing the effects by hand is the whole point of the piece: it is the difference between knowing which library does the thing and knowing what the thing is.