Sheet D · Design

I design websites for fun.

Web design and interface design are the part of this work I would do for free, and mostly do. Hand me a blank page and an evening and I will try to make it do something a web page is not supposed to do.

Walk the gallery Want one?

Brain Melt · October 2026

Twenty-five websites. Three sittings.

I handed an AI model a list of free design tools and one brief: make ten websites, make at least three of them useful, and make every one of them the kind of thing people do not believe is a web page. Then a second list and five more. Then I had it test the best free tools on six lab pages, keep what worked as a kit of tested parts, and build ten more from that kit. I set the bar. It did the building, and every page got checked with screenshots at every scroll stop, at desktop and phone size.

Sites. Each one is a single HTML file.

Stock photos. Images are drawn in code or come from free art libraries, credited.

Frameworks or page builders. Every site opens with a double-click.

Written notes on how each one was made.

Sheet D.1 · The whole setStart here

The Brain Melt index

All twenty-five on one page, with a preview that follows your cursor. Every site has a report beside it covering the inspiration, the visual direction, who that style suits, and the full prompt to rebuild it.

MethodsShaders, particles, fluid simulation, glass that bends light, 3D map terrain, live sound, variable fonts, cut-paper SVG
Ideas borrowed fromMagic UI, Aceternity, Cult UI, NEAT, the Stripe gradient, CSS Peeper, Refero, Anime.js, Kinetics, 3dicons, mapcn, Kage, Paper Shaders, GSAP, Uiverse, Kitbitz, MapLibre
Honest limitThe heavy ones want a decent graphics card

Open the index →

01 · Concept for a real businessUnsolicited

A night highway seen from the driver's seat, with the headline 'Your flight is early. Your driver is earlier.'

Night Run

A Connecticut airport car service reimagined as one drive before dawn, with a trip planner that works. It uses only facts from the company’s own site. No invented prices, no invented reviews. It is a design study and is not affiliated with the business.

Open it →How it was made →

05 · Product launchShowpiece

A liquid chrome sphere on a dark floor behind the word Mercure in large italic serif type.

Mercure N° 80

A perfume launch for a house that does not exist. One blob of liquid chrome splits into three notes, stands up as a bottle, and melts into a pool. Bring your pointer close and pull a drop out of it.

Open it →How it was made →

07 · PlanetariumShowpiece

Night Atlas

160,000 particles become a nebula, a galaxy, Saturn, and tonight’s actual star chart, turned to your clock.

Open it →Notes →

09 · Listening barShowpiece

Blue Hour

A jazz room laid out like album sleeves, floating on ink that moves in real time. Turn the sound on and the notes throw paint.

Open it →Notes →

10 · Local shopNo WebGL

A cut-paper landscape of an orchard with a red barn, a cider mill and apple trees under a pink morning sky.

Hollow Hill

A cut-paper orchard that runs from sunrise to fireflies as you scroll. The harvest wheel knows today’s date. This is the one I would build for a local shop.

Open it →Notes →

08 · ArcadePlayable

An arcade cabinet screen showing the title GLITCH RAIDERS with a score table, inside a retro arcade website.

Continue?

A retro arcade and repair bench living inside a CRT, with a complete shooter in the cabinet. The repair menu is an RPG shop.

Open it →Notes →

06 · Type foundryNo WebGL

Plumb Foundry

Nothing but live type. No images, no shaders. The letters lean toward your pointer and the page stretches as you scroll.

Open it →Notes →

02, 03, 04, 11, 12, 23, 24 · The useful sevenTools

Swatchbook: the words 'Peep the tokens' in loud print-shop type beside a fan of paint chips over halftone dots.

Seven that do a job

A gradient studio, 27 copy-and-paste effects, a design token extractor, a spring motion lab, a service-area map maker, a shader shelf and a glass designer. They live with the rest of my tools.

See the tools →

13 · Title sequenceShowpiece

The Paper Tiger

A website that is a film title sequence. Eighty-six seconds of cut-paper credits in the Saul Bass manner, which you can scrub like film, then the site underneath.

Open it →Notes →

14 · Sleep appShowpiece

Drift

A sleep app landing page that is a soft clay toy box in real 3D. Pick up the toys, toss them, shake the box. The sound mixer on the second phone actually works.

Open it →Notes →

15 · Software productShowpiece

The headline The day board for crews who do the work, above a browser window showing three crew columns of job cards and a route map.

Dispatch

A software landing page where the product works inside the hero. Press Watch it work and a ghost cursor runs the real board for you. Play the day and the vans drive their routes. Then the window shrinks into the page as you scroll.

Open it →Notes →

Batch three · 21 October 2026 Ten more, built from a kit of tested parts

16 · BathhouseGlass

The headline Hot cedar. Cold sea. over rippling sea-green pool tiles, beside a frosted glass panel showing sea and sauna temperatures.

Saltglass

A cold-water bathhouse on a stone pier. Real water ripples over a tiled pool floor behind glass that bends it, the sea temperature follows the date, and the booking desk works, down to the calendar file.

Open it →How it was made →

20 · Trail raceReal terrain

Hollowback 50K

A made-up trail race on the real terrain of Mount Greylock. Scroll and the camera flies the course in 3D while the route fills in. Drag the elevation profile to scout ahead, and the pace check tells you which cutoffs you would miss.

Open it →How it was made →

17 · Timber framerBlueprint

A blueprint drawing of a timber barn frame with orange joinery callouts beside the headline Barns cut by hand. Raised in a day.

Plan Room

The whole site is a drawing set. The barn draws itself, raising day stands the frames up as you scroll, and the calculator prices your barn and prints the spec sheet.

Open it →Notes →

19 · All-night dinerChalk and neon

The Night Owl

A diner drawn on its own chalkboard, lit by a flickering neon owl. The real clock picks the shift and the pie of the hour, and the order pad prints a ticket you slide onto the kitchen rail.

Open it →Notes →

18 · Seed club for kidsClay 3D

A smiling clay flowerpot with a tall sunflower on a pastel windowsill, with four seed packets in front, beside the headline A garden that fits in the mail.

Pocket Garden

Drag a clay seed packet into Pip the pot and a sunflower, radish, cress or pea vine grows in front of you. Pip watches your pointer the whole time.

Open it →Notes →

22 · Synth makerPlayable

A rack of six cream synthesizer modules with black knobs and colored patch cables under the headline Plug something in.

Oddvolt

The website is the synth. Flip the power, drag swinging patch cables between six modules, and every knob changes what you hear. Nothing on it is a recording.

Open it →Notes →

21 · Print studioShowpiece

A risograph print in yellow, orange, green and blue halftone dots of a striped sun over hills, with the headline One ink at a time.

Inkwell & Drum

A riso print shop where the page is a live print. Each ink sits on its own plate and slips out of line as you move. The poster maker hands you a print-size file.

Open it →Notes →

25 · MuseumShowpiece

A brass magnifying glass over a tiny town built on a silver thimble, showing a clock face up close, beside the headline Come closer.

Very Small Things

A museum of miniatures you explore with a brass loupe. Find five things hidden in a town on a thimble, open the cabinet drawers, then walk down in scale to a grain of rice.

Open it →Notes →

House rules

What I care about when I design.

RULE 1LOOK

Every project gets its own face.

The recipe book looks like a 1950s recipe box. The fighting game looks like a headache. This site looks like a service manual. I cannot leave a default alone, and a template is a default.

RULE 2WORK

Pretty and broken is still broken.

Buttons have to do something. Exports get pasted somewhere and run. Pages get looked at phone size, with motion turned down, and with the fancy graphics switched off.

RULE 3TRUTH

Nothing made up.

The car service concept has no prices and no reviews because the real company publishes none. A page that looks expensive and lies is worse than a plain one that does not.

The rest of what I have built, each with its own look →

Asked and answered

Do I make websites for a living? No.

Would I make you one if you paid me? Sure.

I do this because I love it, and I am good at it. I have a day job and a company, so design is the thing I do on my own time, one project at a time. That suits a local shop, a small business, a launch page, or an idea that deserves a better page than the one it has.

If that is you, send me three things. Who the page is for. What it has to do. One site you like and one you cannot stand. I will tell you plainly whether I am the right person for it.

Tell me about your site Other ways to reach me