Award-Winning Digital Experience for a Creative Studio

The Brief

Studio Futura, a Milan-based branding and motion design agency, needed a portfolio website that was itself a testament to their creative capabilities. Their old WordPress site was slow, generic, and embarrassing to show prospective clients. The brief was clear: "Make it feel like an interactive art installation, not a website."

Design Philosophy: Digital Brutalism Meets Editorial

We crafted a visual language that merges neo-brutalist aesthetics (bold typography, raw grids, high contrast) with editorial magazine layouts (elegant spacing, curated imagery, sophisticated animations).

1. Immersive Case Study Experience

Each project page is a full-screen scroll-driven narrative — sections animate in using the Scroll Timeline API and View Transitions.
Custom WebGL shaders (via Three.js) for hover effects on project thumbnails — images distort, ripple, and pixelate based on cursor velocity.
Video backgrounds with intelligent lazy-loading and adaptive bitrate streaming.

2. Headless Architecture

Sanity CMS with a completely custom Studio — the editing interface mirrors the live site's aesthetic so designers feel at home.
Portable Text renderer with custom blocks for embedded Lottie animations, before/after image sliders, and interactive color palette components.
Structured content models for case studies, team bios, journal entries, and client testimonials.

3. Performance Despite Richness

Achieved a Lighthouse Performance score of 98 despite heavy animations.
All WebGL scenes use offscreen canvas and progressive loading — a low-res placeholder appears in < 200ms, high-res assets stream in.
Fonts subset to only used glyphs; images served in AVIF/WebP via Cloudflare Image Resizing.

4. Internationalization

Fully bilingual (IT/EN) with automatic locale detection.
SEO-optimized with hreflang tags and localized structured data (JSON-LD).

Technology Stack

Frontend: Next.js 15, React, Three.js, GSAP, Framer Motion
CMS: Sanity.io (custom Studio)
3D/WebGL: Three.js, custom GLSL shaders
Deployment: Vercel (Edge Functions), Cloudflare CDN
Analytics: Plausible (privacy-first), Hotjar (heatmaps)

Recognition

Awwwards Site of the Day (December 2024).
CSS Design Awards — Best UI/UX/Innovation.
Featured in Muzli Weekly Digest and Brutalist Websites.
120k unique visitors in the first month.