July 2026 · 5 min read
If you scroll this site from top to bottom, space forms around you. Dust drifts at the hero, spirals inward as you read, condenses into a glowing core, collapses, and by the footer a black hole hangs there with its photon ring lit, bending light around your cursor. Scroll back up and it un-happens. A tiny Endurance from Interstellar orbits nearby, because I love that film beyond any professional justification.
A fair question: why would a working designer spend nights on this instead of adding two more portfolio tiles? Here is my honest answer.
The reference came first
I collect references the way other people collect sneakers. The cosmos.so scroll where a flower blooms as you move. Gargantua's accretion disk. The way good sites make scrolling feel like traveling instead of reading. For months these lived in my saved folders doing nothing. Building the site was partly an excuse to finally answer them: not copy them, but reply to them in my own palette.
That is the first reason every designer should build one weird personal thing. Client work answers briefs. Personal work answers references, and references are where your taste actually lives.
Why a shader and not a video
The obvious way to do a scroll-driven formation is a video scrubbed by scroll position. I tried that road first and turned back. Video scrubbing fights the browser: encoding keyframes, decode stutter, megabytes of download for something the visitor might skim in eight seconds. Instead the black hole is a WebGL fragment shader, about a hundred lines of math. Scroll progress is just a number fed into it, so scrubbing is frame-perfect in both directions, the whole thing weighs less than a single photograph, and it can react to the cursor, which no video can.
There is a design lesson in that trade. The impressive-looking solution and the correct solution are often different builds, and the correct one usually feels simpler in the hand and much more stubborn in the details.
Restraint still applies, even in space
Everything glows at eight percent opacity or less. The stars twinkle slowly. Meteors are rare on purpose: one every half minute or so, so catching one feels like luck. There is an easter egg that fires a meteor shower, and I will not tell you where it is. The rule I kept through every iteration was that the sky must never compete with the work. It sets a mood, then gets out of the way of the portfolio wall, which is the part that pays rent.
Nobody hires you because your site has a black hole. But people remember the designer whose site had a black hole, and in a stack of forty applications, being remembered is the entire game. The universe is the wrapping. The work is the gift. Both matter, in that order.