Web design project of the day: Adam Hartwig portfolio

The brilliant portfolio site designer and developer Adam Hartwig was built using HTML5 and, as well as getting the chance to use some of the new semantic elements, Hartwig also wanted to take advantage of deep linking and the History API - "the site is essentially a single page and the advantage of the History API is being able to drop the use of hashes that used to be required to deep link so it behaves like regular URLs," he says.

It's visually pleasing, with many colour changes and animations. Every page shows something different. Even browsing to the homepage, sitting and watching brings a host of animated changes.

To realise his vision for the animations on the site, Hartwig makes full use of CSS3 and the power it provides, even using 3D animations where possible. Hartwig caters for capable browsers and devices, too. He says that "the site utilises a tiered animation system to achieve the best performance on modern browsers, starting from hardware accelerated CSS3 animation to standard CSS3 animation with a JavaScript based backup for older browsers".

This approach also helps to provide smoother animations on tablet and mobile devices. Hartwig makes the point that "the site was mostly an experiment to prove that web apps can hold their ground in terms of performance as opposed to just a clunky browser experience".

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Have you seen any inspirational examples of web design recently? Let us know in the comments!