Subtle and half-transparent, per the brief. Four blobs, one per monogram cell,
each in that letter's own colour, thrown outward from where the letter was: the
mark comes apart into its own palette rather than flashing something unrelated.
The peak opacity is 0.42 light / 0.5 dark and the gradients never reach full
alpha, so it stays a wash rather than a curtain.
Only transform and opacity animate. Both are compositor properties, so this
does not repaint per frame. That is deliberate: animating a filter is what
pegged a core on the matrix animation, because a filter change re-renders the
whole filter graph every frame. Soft edges come from a static radial-gradient
that is painted once and only ever transformed.
The overlay could no longer fade as one piece. Ground and mark fade in 260ms
while the burst runs 420ms plus a 25ms per-blob stagger, so fading the
container would have taken the burst down with it halfway through. They fade
independently now and the shell unmounts at 540ms instead of 300ms, which is
the burst's real length rather than the cross-fade's.
Hidden entirely under prefers-reduced-motion, though those visitors never
reach the splash anyway.
Two separate problems, one of them a real bug.
THE FLASH. The splash is server-rendered, so on a refresh the browser painted
it and only then did hydration read sessionStorage, decide this visitor had
already entered, and remove it. That one painted frame is the flash, and React
cannot prevent it: even useLayoutEffect runs after the server HTML is painted.
So the decision moved before paint. A tiny synchronous script in <head> reads
the session flag and prefers-reduced-motion and stamps the root element; a
plain CSS rule hides the overlay in the frame it would otherwise appear in.
The overlay is `fixed`, so hiding it shifts no layout. Verified with a
Playwright run: after reload the root is already stamped at readyState
"interactive", the overlay computes to display:none, and the splash is not
visible in any of twelve sampled frames.
THE SPLASH ITSELF. It is now only the pillar signature: four dots become the
four pillar symbols -- commerce, crypto, games, education -- become the word
SUCH, then the page takes over. One generated asset (morph_splash*.svg) whose
CSS timeline is scaled to land exactly on 1337ms, from such-graphics 628fcc1.
SPLASH_MS here and motion.splash.ms there are the same number by construction:
a gate that closes early cuts the last letter mid-draw.
Everything else on the splash is gone -- tagline, supporting line, the four
corner nav links, the chevron, the water-refraction filter and its pre-warm.
The corner links were unreachable inside a gate this short anyway, and the
header carries them. splash-logo-data.ts goes with them, now orphaned.
Perf, measured on a local production build: mobile 97, desktop 98, unchanged
from what production scores today. CLS stays ~0. LCP moves 0.9s -> 1.2s on
mobile, because the mark is now a 12KB request where the old logo was an
inlined data URI. Both theme variants are fetched (3.7KB each gzipped) since
`dark:hidden` hides but does not prevent the download, so half of that is
waste. Fixable by inlining as data URIs the way splash-logo-data.ts did, at
the cost of ~30KB in the bundle; not done here because the score did not move.
The splash now runs its water-ripple enter 1.5s after paint instead of waiting
to be clicked. A click, scroll, or arrow key still fast-forwards it, and the
once-per-session flag and reduced-motion skip are unchanged.
Auto-advancing on its own would have cost the Lighthouse score badly: mobile
100 -> 73, desktop 97 -> 73. The cause was not LCP, which never moved. It was
CLS going 0 -> 1.0, and the reason is worth writing down.
The splash was `relative min-h-[100svh]`, a full viewport of height IN document
flow, and only became `fixed` on the way out. Dismissing it therefore pulled a
whole screen out of the flow and shoved the hero up: a layout shift of almost
exactly 1.0. Clicking hid that from CLS, because shifts within 500ms of user
input are excused. Nothing else did.
Which means this was already shipping to real people. Visitors with
prefers-reduced-motion, and anyone returning within a session, never click, so
they took the shift in full: production measured 74 on mobile with CLS 1.0.
The click-gate was masking a live bug, not preventing one.
The splash is now a fixed overlay from its first paint, so it is never in flow
and dismissing it cannot reflow anything. Measured on a local production build:
before -> after
mobile, auto-advance 73 -> 98 (CLS 1.0 -> 0.005)
mobile, reduced-motion 74 -> 98 (CLS 1.0 -> 0.005)
desktop, auto-advance 73 -> 98 (CLS 0.702 -> 0.011)
Mobile gives up 2 points against today's click-gated 100, entirely in Speed
Index (1.9s -> 4.4s), which is the unavoidable cost of holding a cover at all.
Desktop ends up ahead of where it started. The hold is one constant if you want
a different beat.
The scroll-past-to-dismiss IntersectionObserver is gone: an overlay never
leaves the viewport, so it could not fire. Scroll intent still enters, via the
wheel/touch/key handlers already in the splash, and the shell now locks page
scroll while the cover is up.
The hero h1 is now "Precision Engineering for Everyone". The concrete offer
moves into the supporting line, which keeps the search terms the h1 gives up
and no longer restates the splash's opening sentence.
The title's gradient drifts instead of sweeping: a 300% ramp over 18s with
symmetric easing, so there is no hard turnaround at either end of the travel.
Em dashes are gone from every tsx/ts file (87 lines, 104 occurrences), per
AGENTS.md rule 9. Label lists and titles take a colon; appositives take
commas; independent clauses take a semicolon or a period. A few sentences
were restructured where no single mark read well.
Metadata keeps "Crypto" deliberately: it is a real service line and a real
search term, and it is no longer in the visible headline.
- Voice unified on the title-tag register: the homepage h1 now says what we
sell (Custom E-commerce, Apps & Crypto Tools); 'Precision engineering for
everyone' is demoted to the supporting line. The structured-data and
manifest descriptions now match the OG description instead of carrying
their own registers.
- The off-palette cyan/blue gradients are gone: .hero-title and the new
.brand-gradient-text use the four-colour system (light palette on light,
dark palette on dark, per the pack). Splash cover text, services and
portfolio headings, the hero aura, and button shadows all follow.
- The splash now dismisses once 40% scrolled past instead of requiring the
whole screen to leave the viewport (it was already once-per-session and
reduced-motion-skipping).
- Portfolio: heading 'Portfolio', subtitle 'Products & projects', meta title
to match; grid grows to three columns on xl in a max-w-6xl container.
- anim3_matrix slimmed: single-layer glow, unfiltered crackle and orbs, and
the border cycles stroke colour instead of animating filter:hue-rotate --
the filter animation forced a full filter re-render per frame and pegged a
core on the page hosting it.
Scroll-enter: the triggering gesture's MOMENTUM outlives the 800ms wave (a trackpad
flick trails ~1.5s), and those ticks scrolled the revealed page so you landed below
the hero. The scroll lock now holds until the input goes quiet (250ms without a
wheel/touch event, 3s cap) and releases exactly at the top. Verified with a simulated
14-tick 1.5s flick: lands scrollY=0, and a fresh gesture afterwards scrolls normally.
Bloomword recut: the loop opened with a 1s bloom hold so hover felt dead (movement
backloaded). Now a 0.2s hold then a brisk 3x retract into the full regrow, closing bob
at the end; still frame0==frameN (seam 0.0000), 390KB.
Webshops tagline: 'One platform, unlimited possibilities.'
- Mobile jump fix: compute the monitor anchor from the title's document-absolute top
(scroll-independent) and only recompute on a real width change, so the address-bar
resize that fires mid-scroll no longer snaps it. Mobile parallax now lifts the field
up and away (faster than scroll) instead of drifting down over the text.
- Pointer parallax (desktop only): the field nudges toward the cursor, spring-damped
so it can never move abruptly. No mousemove on touch, so no mobile cost.
- Live monitor: a CSS blinking terminal cursor inside the screen (opacity only =
compositor); it shifts color on each streamer hit, reinforcing the impact pulse.
- Lighter mobile field: streamer density 8->5 and lines ~15% thinner on phones.
Desktop motion unchanged. (CSS/SMIL streamer rewrite deferred to its own commit.)
The data-URI logo still had LCP ~5s with zero network request, proving the
bottleneck is render delay (JS), not the image. So:
- page.tsx is now a Server Component. The hero, tagline, buttons, ServicesPreview,
PortfolioGrid, and FounderSignature render as static server HTML (they had no
client features, so they now hydrate to nothing).
- Splash state machine + header/nav/background gating + nebula position + scroll
restoration moved into a small client island (home-shell.tsx) that takes the
static content as children. Nebula reads the title via getElementById.
- Dedupe @types/react to 19 across the workspace (pnpm override) so the
server->client children boundary type-checks.
jwinterm