The brief
Christie Hemm Klok is a San Francisco photojournalist whose work runs in National Geographic, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Wired. Her portfolio needed to put the photography first, feel nothing like a template grid, and be easy for her to update herself. The answer: a site built around exploration rather than scrolling — every surface is panned, dragged or flicked — with the interface pared back to a dot grid, a slash motif and one acid-yellow accent.
The site
The homepage is a full-bleed, draggable canvas of images. First-time visitors get an intro — the title resolves out of a flicker over a single hero image, then the view pulls back to reveal the whole collection as the title settles into the navigation. Any image clicks through to its project.
Category pages are horizontal galleries: each project is a column of images that drift gently as you move through, with a playful cursor ("Click to see all 13 images") on desktop and a swipeable carousel on touch. Choosing a project triggers the site's signature moment: the images you can see fly into their exact places on the incoming page.
Project pages lay each story out as a collage, with a full-screen viewer that grows out of its thumbnail — and on a phone, dismisses with a flick. Keep scrolling at the end of a story and the next one takes over seamlessly. The full archive lives on a single page: an endless, drag-anywhere grid of every photograph on the site.
The details
A site this animated only works if it feels effortless, so much of the project went into the invisible parts: transitions that stay silky on mid-range phones, touch that behaves exactly like native scrolling — images track your finger and glide to a stop the way iOS does — fast loads that fetch only the images near your screen, and a calmer version of everything for visitors who prefer reduced motion.
Christie manages it all herself — galleries, the about page, even search and social previews — through a simple CMS; publishing a change rebuilds and ships the site automatically.
Stack: Astro · DatoCMS · GSAP · Lenis · Swup · Netlify
