Challenge
A personal site has to explain six different disciplines without becoming a wall of logos, stay fast on a free host and work in English, Russian and Georgian.
Approach
The visual idea comes from prepress: a halftone screen, two spot inks and registration marks. The palette, “Abanotubani”, takes cobalt from the tiles of Tbilisi’s Orbeliani bath and amber from qvevri wine. Both inks map to real spot colours, so the site and printed matter can share one specification.
Technically the site is static Astro with TypeScript. Content lives in collections with validated schemas; each language has its own URLs with correct canonical and hreflang tags.
Details
- A WebGL shader turns the portrait into an ink halftone; the cursor reveals the photo underneath
- Variable typography (Geologica’s weight and sharpness axes) reacts to the pointer
- Page transitions use the browser’s View Transitions with a halftone ink wipe
- A free Halftone Generator uses the same rendering idea
- All motion switches off for visitors who prefer reduced motion
Result
A fast, multilingual site with structured data, a generated sitemap and no monthly hosting cost, built with AI-assisted development in Claude Code.