Web designer and developer
Design and full development of an Awwwards-recognised agency website, built with Astro and a headless Payload CMS.
Salo Creative Agency Website
Intro
Salo is the design agency where I work as Senior Creative Technologist. When it came time to rebuild our own site, the design was a team effort, but the entire development was mine, from the first animation prototype to the production deploy.
Live site: https://salo.uk Awwwards Honourable Mention, 2026.
The brief
An agency site has one job: prove the agency can do the work. We knew from the start we wanted ambitious scroll-driven animation and a site that felt hand-made rather than templated, without sacrificing performance.
Prototyping in code
We started in Figma, as we always do. It's our design tool of choice and the visual direction was shaped there. But scroll animation is about motion, timing and feel, and Figma is too static to answer those questions. So I moved the animation work into code early, using Claude Code to prototype quickly in GSAP. Being able to just see stuff, with real scroll physics and real viewport behaviour, meant we could iterate much faster.
From there we worked back and forth between Figma and the browser, testing different ideas for the scroll animations. It was a faster, richer way of working than either tool alone. Once the direction was agreed, I rebuilt each animation properly: optimised, accessible, and tied into the CMS so the content team could edit freely without breaking anything.
The build
The site runs on a headless Payload CMS (React) with an Astro front end, using Astro's view transitions for seamless navigation. The scroll animation is built with GSAP, and media is served through Cloudflare's image pipeline. The result is a heavily animated site that still loads fast, because the animation work sits on top of a lean, static-first architecture rather than fighting against it.
Outcome
The site shipped this year and has earned an Awwwards Honourable Mention so far, with full judging still to come. More importantly, it does the job an agency site exists to do: it proves the work. Much of Salo's business comes through agency partnerships, and the feedback from those partners, particularly the development agencies we work alongside, is that the site changed how they see us. A design agency that can design and ship work at this level keeps everyone on their toes.
This is the project I'm proudest of shipping. Every animation, every interaction, every performance decision was mine, and the result holds its own against studios many times our size.
Tech
Astro, Payload CMS (React), TypeScript, GSAP, Cloudflare, Claude Code (prototyping)
