165 design references

Huy Phan · a canvas of colorful projects

Reel by Andrew Chornyy

Lay the projects out as pictures on a wide white field and let the visitor travel across them, so the work is the page instead of a column of titles.

Visit website · Huy Phan

What to look at

After a car shot, the reel shows huyml.co, with the tab reading Huy Phan. The page is white, and the pictures are not in rows. A pink SB badge, a photo of two men, an office with monitors, a purple chevron graphic, and an ice cream cup marked EISLAB sit in different places, with empty space around them. "Audio Off" is at the top. Small writing runs along the edges, including a date and a line that starts "Crafted a playful." The view pans so one picture lands in the middle and the others are cut off at the sides.

The projects sit apart on a white field: a pink SB mark in the middle, a portrait near the top, and writing only at the edges.
The projects sit apart on a white field: a pink SB mark in the middle, a portrait near the top, and writing only at the edges.
A later pan leaves one project, the EISLAB ice cream, alone in the middle, with the neighboring pictures cut off.
A later pan leaves one project, the EISLAB ice cream, alone in the middle, with the neighboring pictures cut off.

Why it works

People look at photographs of the actual work and skip decoration, so the ice cream cup and the two people are the projects, not ornaments. Words do their job when they sit next to the picture they name. On this page the pan often leaves the picture in the middle and the writing at the edge, so the name can leave the screen. A field of pictures also shows fewer projects at once than a list of names. That limit comes from research on website menus, and this is a website: you travel farther, and it is easy to stop at the first picture that looks close enough.

Try it

  1. Place each project as one picture, and keep its name close enough that a pan cannot separate them.
  2. Add a plain list of the same names, so someone who wants one project does not have to wander the field.
  3. Open on a few pictures, not the whole archive.
  4. Leave sound off until the visitor turns it on. The reel and the live page both show an Audio Off control.
  5. On a phone, stack the pictures with their names instead of asking for a sideways pan.

What it costs

A loose field has no top-to-bottom order, so a visitor can get lost, and a name that sits far from its picture fails as soon as the view moves. Several large pictures are also what the page waits on before it feels loaded. The reel does not show a phone layout.

Words worth knowing

Sources