### 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