- Agency: Studio 375
- Category: Website Design — Storytelling
- Location: Thiene, Italy
- Project Brief: Design a storytelling website that celebrates Studio375's tenth anniversary through an interactive comic, immersive WebGL experiences, and engaging digital storytelling.
Storytelling website design lives or dies on pacing. Ten Years Away turns the scrollbar itself into a narrator. The site runs as a horizontal, scroll-driven comic. As you scroll, the camera drifts through each chapter's panels inside a fixed WebGL canvas, so the years feel read rather than loaded.
The background does quiet narrative work. A GLSL shader plane reads scroll velocity and shifts its soft, smoke-like shadows accordingly. Speed up, and they stretch into thin directional streaks that push the scene toward a sense of time passing.
The comic logic runs into the interaction, not just the art. The cursor leaves a halftone dot trail, a nod to offset printing. It bleeds across the panels and shrinks when you hover over something clickable, so the medium shows up in how you move.
The chapter transitions and audio seal the effect. Panels for each new year arrive scattered, then slide into alignment instead of snapping in. Every chapter also carries its own crossfading track, one that nudges its playback rate with your scroll speed, though the team wisely kills audio on slow connections.
