Build Around Life

Seventeen essays arranged as a spiral, so that the index of the section is also its image.

Koleksiyon is a Turkish furniture manufacturer, and Build Around Life is the editorial arm of the site — pieces on learning, healing, deep work, circular systems, an architect’s vision. Ordinary editorial material. The problem with ordinary editorial material is that a list of seventeen titles looks like a list of seventeen titles, and the reader decides whether to care before reading any of them.

So the index is a figure. Cards sit in concentric rings, each rotated against its neighbour, the whole thing reading as a rosette with the section title in the middle. Nothing is labelled until you approach it.

The rings turn independently as the page scrolls. Their speeds differ, so the pattern that looked fixed on arrival is never the same twice — the figure is stable enough to recognise and unstable enough to keep watching.

On load the cards arrive staggered rather than together, which is what stops a shape this regular from reading as a static image someone exported.

Hovering stops the rotation and brings the colour up across the whole field. That pairing is the part worth pointing at: motion and colour are on the same switch. At rest the spiral is grey and moving; under attention it is still and saturated. The transition tells you the thing is responsive before you have read a single word, and it does it without a tooltip, a cursor change or a label.

Clicking interpolates the thumbnail into its position in the article rather than replacing one page with another. The card you chose is still the card you are looking at when the text arrives, which keeps the spiral present in the reading rather than discarded at the door.

Built with one other developer, as part of the full site.