Acreline
Web Development + Motion
Description
Acreline is a concept build — an architectural lighting and electrical fit-out contractor, invented so we could hold a trades site to a gallery standard instead of a template one. Everything on it is real code, built and measured the same way a client build is.
Numbers
The opening sequence plays across just over six screen-heights of scroll — a room revealing itself as you move, not a video that autoplays at you.
End to end, the hero timeline runs eighteen seconds. Scrubbed, so the visitor sets the pace and can stop anywhere in it.
Home, About and a project page — all returning 200 on the deployed build, read back in production rather than assumed.
No console errors and no horizontal overflow at desktop or mobile, checked on the live deployment.
The problem
Trades sites nearly all look the same, and they look cheap in the same way — a stock van on a blue gradient, a form nobody fills in, and photography that could belong to any one of four hundred other contractors. For a business selling craft, the site is the first place the craft is supposed to show, and it is usually the first place it disappears.
We wanted to prove the opposite case before pitching it to anyone: that a contractor's site can carry gallery-grade art direction and still be fast, accessible and honest about what the business does. So we built one with nothing riding on it, and held it to the standard we would hold a paying build to.
What we did
A ROOM, NOT A HERO IMAGE
The opening is a scroll-scrubbed sequence through a lit interior — warm coves, brushed metal, light doing the work. It reads as the product rather than a decoration over the top of it, and because it is scrubbed the visitor controls it. Nothing plays without them.
PROCESS AS ONE SIDEWAYS COMPOSITION
How the work runs is told as a single sticky architectural photograph with the process beats scrolling past it, crossfading once per beat. One scrub for the hero, none after it — a second scrubbed section is where these pages usually start to feel like a toy. On mobile each frame drops inline instead.
AUDITED LIKE A CLIENT BUILD
We ran the same audit we run on paid work and it failed in useful ways: contact sat seventeen screens down, some cards looked clickable but were not, and placeholder proof was still sitting in the layout. All logged, all fixed — the audit is banked in the taste ledger so the next trades build starts past those mistakes.
ANONYMOUS ON PURPOSE
Acreline is a made-up name and the proof on it is anonymised too, not just the logo. A demo that borrows a real company's team photos and client list to sell a fictional brand is a demo that lies, however good it looks. This one is clearly its own thing.
Concept build, deployed and read back in production 26 July 2026: home, About and project routes all 200, hero 640vh at 18.125s, zero console errors and zero horizontal overflow at desktop and mobile. Built in Astro with GSAP, ScrollTrigger and Lenis; deployed on Cloudflare Pages.
More work
