the build standard


Every moment on this page is a named technique from our website standard, running live. Scroll it. The page is the spec sheet.

See it on your site
01 S8 parallax depth layers · S1 scroll-driven reveal

Most sites are the first thing a model would build.

Identical card grids. A centered hero with three icon-title-subtitle boxes. Tiny tracked labels above every section. It is competently made and completely forgettable, because every structural choice was the reflex choice.

Our standard exists to make the second choice. It is nine gates, a locked craft recipe, and an effects catalog where every technique names what actually builds it.

02 S7 progress-linked SVG draw · diagrams over words

The nine gates, as a picture.

BUILD-2 is the quality gate. Not a checklist bolted on at the end.

03 S3 pinned horizontal scroll · S2 scrub

Scroll down. It moves sideways.

GATE 02

The fact-lock

Every concrete fact is primary-source verified. Anything unverifiable is marked and left off the page. A spreadsheet is not a source.

01
GATE 05

The design directive

One point of view. One hero variant. Exact font pairing. The real color anchor, sampled from a real logo. No ranges, no defaults left open.

02
GATE 07

The craft recipe

Locked section order, typography, colour, layout, motion, depth. And the rule that beats all of them: a diagram beats a paragraph.

03
GATE 08

Check, then test

Screenshot review on desktop and mobile. A design-quality pass. Every word through the human filter. No horizontal overflow, ever.

04
GATE 09

The launch gate

Canonical deploy script. Live 200 on the custom domain. Link-preview image. Mobile and desktop verified. Client pages ship gated.

05
04 S4 sticky stacking cards · pure CSS, zero JS

Four things that make a page feel expensive.

Weld, don't trigger

Scroll position becomes the playhead

A triggered animation fires and finishes. A scrubbed one is welded to the scrollbar, so the visitor is driving. That welded feeling is most of what people mean by alive.

Weight and inertia

Smooth scroll changes the whole feel

One small library is responsible for a surprising amount of why a site feels considered. It also exposes velocity, which unlocks effects that react to how fast you move.

Contrast as composition

Enormous type against tiny labels

The spec-sheet look is a layout decision, not a technology. Huge display type beside 11px monospace reads as designed on purpose. Look at the label above every section here.

Restraint

Buttons get almost nothing

Frequency decides. The narrative sections get everything. Nav, forms and inputs get almost no motion, because a control that performs is a control that annoys on the fortieth use.

05 count-up on intersect · S1 reveal

What got consolidated into one skill.

0
lines of craft absorbed
0
reference files, one home
0
gates, none skippable
0
duplicate copies left
Part II · added 2026-09-03
08 V1 ambient hero film · T2 text-clipped VIDEO · V5 brand grade

Real people. Inside the letters.

The film below was generated this morning with Seedance 2.5 from a one-paragraph prompt. It plays muted behind everything, and again inside the type. Both are the same file.

09 V2 masked video reveal · V3 scroll-triggered autoplay

The film, inside the wave.

An SVG clip-path shaped like our motif. It only plays while it is on screen, and pauses the moment it leaves.

PAUSED · OFF SCREEN
10 S6 scroll-scrubbed video · frames on a canvas, never currentTime

Scroll. The film obeys.

FRAME 001 / · PROGRESS 0%
11 V4 Ken Burns · V5 duotone · X4 curtain · M5 tilt · M4 spring

Five photographs, five treatments.

All five were generated this morning with Nano Banana. Hover the duotone to see the true color. Move over the diagram to tilt it; it settles on a CSS spring, no library.

An operations leader at a kitchen island at 7am, laptop open, deciding
the scene sentence, made literalV4 · KEN BURNS
Three colleagues mapping a process on a whiteboard
hover for true colorV5 · DUOTONE GRADE
Hands holding a tablet with a simple dashboard in a warehouse aisle
revealed behind a sliding panelX4 · CURTAIN
A hand-drawn workflow diagram in ink with one box circled in gold
pointer tilts, spring settlesM5 + M4
A ribbon of light shifting from purple through fuchsia to gold
image expansion on scroll · the luxury-site move (@web.love.ed)
12 D1 scroll-scrubbed 3D · D2 camera path · D3 emissive + bloom · D4 particles · A2 pointer-reactive

The molten wave.

Emissive gold plus a bloom pass, so the line blows out into a halo. Additive embers. The camera moves with your scroll; the scene leans toward your pointer. Three.js, loaded only for this section.

13 D5 noise fragment shader · D6 WebGL hover displacement

The award layer, written raw.

No library. Left: two photographs dissolve through simplex noise as you scroll. Right: move your pointer and the image ripples under it.

D5 · noise dissolve · scroll to drive
D6 · displacement · hover to ripple
14 T4 variable font · T5 scramble · T7 kinetic transition · T8 marquee · D7 kinetic 3D type

The type lab.

T5 · characters cycle before they settle
Weight follows scroll.

Inter is a variable font. The weight above animates from 200 to 900 as the line crosses the viewport, on a registered CSS property, zero JavaScript.

We build sites that convert.load.breathe.argue.
15 craft signals · M2 M3 M4 F3 F4 F5 F6 X1 X2 X3 A1 A3 A4

The small things that read as expensive.

M3 · HOVER WITH INTENT
Gold underline grows, arrow slides
Plain CSS transitions on exact properties. This is the whole gold system.
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F3 · METALLIC SHEEN
One highlight sweep, every 5.5s
Masked over the spectrum. Brand law: one or two per page. This is the one.
MetAiBlock
F4 · GLOW DISCIPLINE
Glow only as feedback
Ambient neon glow is instant slop. Hover or tab to the button: the gold halo is the only glow on this page.
M2 · CUSTOM CURSOR
Shown for the record, off by default
The catalog says skip it: it is the agency cliché, and gold focus states are our signature instead.
A4 · SOUND
Off by default, always
Opt in, then hover any button in this row. A 40ms sine blip from the Web Audio API. Likely never shipped; here so you can hear why.
A1 · IDLE MICRO-MOTION
The page breathes when you stop
One 9-second transform on one element. Look at the hero wave and the mark below.
X2 · SHARED-ELEMENT MORPH
A thumbnail becomes the panel
Same-document View Transitions. Click one.
A3 · LIVE DATA AS MOTION
Numbers that tick
Bottom-right HUD: scroll velocity, the page's measured transfer weight, and a clock. Weight is reported, never used to refuse a build.
F5 grain + gradient · F2 the angle moves with scroll · X3 section handoff

The 2026 default look, in one band.

Grain over a gradient whose angle is scrubbed to your scroll. The spectrum has to move to read as alive. This band hands its color to the next section instead of stopping at a hard edge.

06 the receipts

Every technique on this page, named.

The whole catalog, 49 techniques. Green is running on this page right now; gold names the exact asset or runtime the rest still need. Call them by ID.

07 magnetic cursor · the close

This is what "build a website" gets you now.

Not a template. A standard, with the taste layer and the capability layer in the same place as the procedure.

Book a conversation