Inspiration item 10, filed 2026-10-21 from the owner's note in chat. Direction for the exploration rounds, not a build order.
What it actually is (looked at 2026-10-21)
One screen, no scroll, white. About eighty flat coloured discs of many sizes drift slowly in a three-dimensional cloud. The ones tilted away from the viewer read as ellipses, which is what gives the depth. The headline "A data design and technology consultancy" sits inside the cloud, with discs passing in front of and behind the type. The navigation is plain text (Watch our story, Services, Work, About, Research, Careers, Contact). At the foot: "Explore by color".
The discs are colours of the studio's work. Corrected by the teardown (teardowns/cleverfranke/): 282 instanced spheres, one per palette colour of every case (86 cases from 35 experiences), laid out in 3D by a force simulation with a cluster force, drawn with three.js through react-three-fiber. The orb spins on its own and tilts with the pointer; the wheel dollies in and out; dragging does not rotate it (the orbit controls are mounted disabled). A disc never opens a case directly: "Explore by color" asks for three colour picks (a hover dwell on desktop, taps on the phone), a worker matches them to the nearest palette, and the matched case is revealed through a displaced point plane before a colour flood into the case page. The earlier renders in cleverfranke/ show the start field, not the resting orb.
On the phone: fewer and larger discs, the navigation as a vertical list, still one screen.
Screenshots: cleverfranke/desktop-top.png and cleverfranke/mobile-top.png, rendered headless on 2026-10-21. Not in the scan of 2026-10-20; none of the thread's galleries listed it.
The owner's reading, in his words
"I really like the homepage here how the dots are floating in a cloud kind of thing. That could essentially be something like the homepage or that could be all the speakers or something like that."
"You could kind of zoom around or rotate it and click on them to expand. But or just could be kind of like the homepage."
"It looks very much like a freer mind kind of relaxing and interesting."
How it could map
The stage before the first question. A slow cloud is a good idle state for the stage behind the bar in the centre (bar-stage-drawers.md). It asks nothing of the visitor and reads as a mind at rest. The discs could be thoughts (the themes, the sessions) or the speakers.
The speakers as the cloud. One disc per speaker (77 in the stand-in data), colour from a palette that means something (track, day, kind of company), drag to rotate, pinch to zoom, and a disc opens the speaker drawer (item 7). With the marker look (item 8) the discs become marker dots on paper and open into the sketch that reveals the photograph. "Explore by colour" becomes "by track" or "by day", or simply an ask typed into the bar: "who speaks on Tuesday".
Caveats for the samples. A hundred or so discs is nothing for a point cloud; portraits inside the discs are a different matter (texture memory, legibility at small sizes), so keep the discs abstract and let the drawer carry the face. A cloud without labels needs an honest way to find one person: the bar is that way. The motion must stop under reduced-motion settings, and it should not compete with the writing-out of item 8 on the same screen; one of them leads at a time.