Spesland

The home page opens on a video of a city at night. The video stays where it is while the page scrolls up over it, so the first white section, GovChat, slides across the city like a sheet of paper until it's covered.

Spesland's tools are for the people who run cities, so I wanted a city to be the first thing you see and the thing the rest of the site sits on. A full-screen video is also the heaviest thing on the site, so in the 2026 revision phones get their own portrait cut of it at about a quarter of the size, and readers who turn motion off get a still frame. The shipped video drifted down as you scrolled, which hid where the pinning ended. I took the drift out, and the video now stops at the bottom of GovChat.

News is the one part of the site that keeps changing, so when it scrolls into view the whole page turns black, header included. Pointing at a country swaps the story. Three black bars wipe across the headline, the photo and the description, the new story is written in underneath, and the bars pull back.

The header was the hard part. It has to sit over a white page and a black one, so it uses a difference blend to stay readable on both. The swap I shipped closed the photo last, and the story could change while the old photo was still showing. I rebuilt it in 2026 so the three bars move together and the last country you point at always wins.

The header logo is the symbol and the word Spesland. When you scroll down to read, the word fades and leaves the symbol on its own. Scroll back up and it returns. At the bottom of every page the footer spells the name out in large letters that drop into place one by one.

While you're reading, the name doesn't need to be there, and the symbol is enough to get you home. It does mean the name is missing from the header for most of the page, so the footer gives it back once, at full size. The 2026 revision fades the letters one at a time, last letter first, and has them follow whichever way you last scrolled, so a quick turn can't leave them hidden. The footer now builds once per visit.