Responses by Luca Franceschetti, designer and art director; and Marko Vurnek, developer.

Background: “Giannantonio De Maldè is an artist and art director at web design firm Zerotredici Studio,” says Luca Franceschetti. “As his first online retrospective, Canvas Chronicles is a journey into Giannantonio’s work.”

Design core: “The typography, whitespace and microinteractions are all focused on highlighting Giannantonio’s work,” Franceschetti explains. “There are some subtle details that make the experience more compelling without distracting the user—the intro animation that is reminiscent of a book cover or an exhibition poster, and the overview and bio transitions that evokes both the gestures of painting and oil tempera spreading on a canvas.”

Challenges: “The challenge was to balance the artwork with a dynamic UI—to make the experience satisfying while keeping the focus on the content, not the container,” says Franceschetti. “I wanted to make sure the design didn’t follow current trends but rather felt like something that might have been elegant five years ago and hopefully still will be five years from now.”

Navigation structure: “The top navigation changes three times contextually to the section or page,” Franceschetti says. “I wanted to make every page as clear as possible, but with the potential to insert some navigation modes where they would be needed or preferred.”

Special navigation feature: “My favorite feature is the progress bar on sliders,” Franceschetti says. “It has an additional function as a dragger, just in case.”

Technology: “The project was built using Astro as a static site generator, making it easier to manage components and handle content collections for more structured and scalable content organization,” explains Marko Vurnek. “A custom JavaScript framework was created to handle routing and animations, functioning as a single-page application for a seamless user experience. For the WebGL layer, the OGL library was used for its lightweight structure and lower-level control over rendering. All WebGL animations were written in GLSL and offloaded to the GPU to keep performance smooth and responsive, reducing the load on the CPU.”