Reaction Board

Maxime Heckel

Product engineer at Linear who built his portfolio as a living technical case study: the homepage intro IS a custom dithering + color-quantization post-processing shader he published as a blog series. Design and engineering proof are the same artifact.

Steal: use a real shader effect you authored as the hero element · the portfolio *demonstrates* rather than *describes* the capability.

Rauno Freiberg

Staff Design Engineer at Vercel whose site is a manifesto in restraint: desktop-OS dock, horizontal-scroll project galleries, interface sounds on navigation · every detail is an interaction essay. Awwwards HM 2025.

Steal: interface sounds tied to navigation events · not ambient audio, but discrete feedback that rewards precision clicking.

Paco Coursey

Webmaster at Linear who weaponizes restraint: no hero animation, no particle systems · a text-first working-document portfolio where the absence of decoration is the argument. Makes adjacent sites look insecure.

Steal: radical subtraction · remove every ornamental element and let hierarchical typography carry full weight, then bury one tiny micro-interaction for reward.

Stefan Vitasović

Creative developer at 14islands, SOTD + Dev Award Sept 2025. Entry screen loops his name in layered kinetic type; inside, a WebGL video-grid shows case studies as live textures mapped onto planes in 3D space with seamless page transitions between sections.

Steal: the WebGL-texture-mapped video grid · case studies as live video planes in a 3D scene rather than lightbox thumbnails.

Pacôme Pertant

Motion & sound designer, SOTD + Dev Award June 2026 (built with Louis Bocquet). Entry asks 'enter with sound / without sound' · foregrounding audio as co-equal to motion. The navigational structure is a WebGL spiral that unifies the entire site into one continuous space.

Steal: binary audio-entry gate that turns sound into a first-class design decision, not an afterthought toggle.

Guillaume Colombel

Interactive developer, SOTD 2024. Built his portfolio around a cinematic-titles concept: a rotating cylindrical slider modelled on a film reel · projects appear as frames on a drum that spins as you scroll, making the navigation mechanism itself the brand statement.

Steal: the cylindrical CSS/WebGL 3D drum scroll · projects orbit on a reel rather than laying flat in a grid.

Grégory Lallé

Creative developer, SOTD + Dev Award Oct 2024. Deliberately no WebGL, no unnecessary animation · raw numbered grid of project entries with image focus pages, proving that brutalist reduction can win Awwwards when the underlying work is strong enough.

Steal: sequentially numbered project grid with zero decorative scaffolding · confidence in the work displaces confidence in the frame.

Femme Fatale Studio

Paris studio whose homepage is a deconstructed 3D bust of Greta Garbo rendered in WebGL/Three.js · fragments orbit and reassemble on scroll, with 250+ images and textures woven into case study pages. Awwwards SOTD, FWA, CSSDA recognition.

Steal: a fragmenting/reassembling 3D sculpture as hero · identity mark becomes the animation, not background to it.

Grégory Lallé + Thomas Monavon · Angus Emmerson Portfolio

Video editor portfolio built by Lallé & Monavon, SOTD Feb 2024. Kinetic type on scroll drives the entire navigation · names and titles morph/stretch as you move through sections, treating the editor's timeline sensibility as typography.

Steal: scroll-velocity-driven letter-spacing expansion · type physically stretches proportional to scroll speed, turning momentum into readable signal.

Basement Studio

Buenos Aires dev studio whose site is a real-time proof of their stack: WebGL canvas, Lenis smooth scroll, and their open-source shader-lab all running live. The studio manifests through the site's own codebase as a public R&D log.

Steal: the 'site as open-source product' · link live demos and open repos from the portfolio itself so visitors can inspect rather than merely admire.

Darkroom Engineering

Makers of Lenis · their site is a living activity log of OSS libraries, client work, and experimental products, with Lenis-powered silken scroll as an ever-present demo. The studio positions as engineers who 'speak design fluently,' which the site proves by being the best Lenis demo in existence.

Steal: use your own open-source tool as the primary site motion system · the scroll experience IS the product demo.

Samsy (SMSY-Gen02)

Creative graphics engineer, SOTD + Dev Award + FWA SOTM Oct 2025. The entire portfolio is a 3D navigable world · not a website with 3D accents but a continuous spatial environment you fly through to discover projects, built in Vue + GSAP + custom WebGL.

Steal: replace the page paradigm entirely with a 3D spatial navigation · projects are *locations* to travel to, not cards to click.

Unseen Studio 2025 Wrapped

Year-in-review microsite, SOTD + multiple major awards. Signature move is a real-time ASCII liquid simulation in WebGL · fluid dynamics compute running frame-by-frame, ASCII characters remapped to brightness values, so liquid literally becomes text.

Steal: ASCII-remapped fluid simulation · encode a physics computation as a typographic field, making every frame simultaneously motion and language.

Lusion (lusion.co)

Studio SOTY + Developer SOTY at Awwwards, Webby, Cannes Lions. Their site (and every client build) treats real-time rendering as default · ion particle experiments, real-time lighting, physically based materials. The studio proves creative-tech at client scale.

Steal: commit one section to a real-time particle/fluid experiment with no relation to content · show the engine running idle as brand proof.

Cyd Stumpel Portfolio 2025

Freelance developer, SOTD March 2025. Uses native CSS View Transitions and Scroll-Driven Animations · no JS animation library · with 'turn card' interactions that flip service tiles on hover, proving accessibility-first motion can still win Awwwards.

Steal: CSS-native Scroll-Driven Animations + View Transitions for page changes · zero GSAP dependency, best-practice a11y, same visual punch.

Active Theory V6

SOTD Sept 2024. V6 introduced multiplayer presence · visitors see each other as cursor ghosts in real time · and an AI chat layer embedded in the portfolio itself. The interface makes the studio's real-time tech capabilities visible at portfolio load.

Steal: multiplayer cursor presence on a static-seeming portfolio · other visitors are visible as silent actors, making the site feel alive without explicit social UI.

Linear (linear.app)

The site that named a design trend. 2025 update doubled down: near-monochrome black/white with surgical accent, zero decorative copy, pricing that needs no sales call. Every page reads as a proof that opinionated craft and 3.7× JIRA performance are the same argument.

Steal: strip every marketing hedge · no 'powerful,' 'seamless,' 'delightful' · and replace with one measurable claim or a precise mechanism description.

Stripe Press

Publishing arm of Stripe. Each book is a real Three.js 3D object · scroll rotates spine to cover, some titles have 'Living Cover' generative-art experiences. Evidence-forward editorial design: the physical quality of the books is argued through the fidelity of the 3D render.

Steal: parallel-scroll Three.js book rotation · scroll position drives a 3D Y-axis spin on each object, revealing spine then cover as the user moves.

MERSI Architecture

Paris architecture studio, SOTD + Portfolio Honors Awwwards 2026. Every superfluous element removed · projects arrive as single full-bleed photographs with location, category, year as the only metadata. Quiet luxury as reduction: no headline, no tagline on project cards, just image and coordinates.

Steal: strip project metadata to exactly three data points (location · type · year) and use only full-bleed photography · information density as curation signal.

House of van Schneider (HOVS)

2024 redesign after 8 years. Identity anchors on ✣HOVS · a fleuron glyph prefix to the acronym · paired with the line 'I CREATE; THEREFORE I AM.' The mark functions as both logo and philosophical proposition, every application referencing this existential declaration.

Steal: use a Unicode glyph (fleuron, dagger, asterism) as permanent prefix to your abbreviation · makes any monogram feel historically grounded and typographically uncommon.

Tobias Ahlin

GitHub design engineer who built SpinKit and Moving Letters · his site doubles as a curated library of animation patterns. The identity move: publish your technical experiments as free tools and let the adoption surface become the portfolio's proof of reach.

Steal: embed two or three live open-source demos (e.g., a GSAP/CSS animation utility) directly in the portfolio navigation · adoption numbers are social proof no case study can match.

Unseen Studio (main site)

34 SOTDs. The studio's identity is held together by a consistent output cadence · the site functions as a high-frequency editorial, with each project page carrying the same structural DNA regardless of client. The 'brand' is the body of work presented as one sustained voice.

Steal: establish a single rigid project-page template so consistent that the template itself becomes the identity · format as fingerprint.