stoa is a fictional architecture practice with studios in Moscow and Dubai, working on buildings, public space and interiors. I built its website as a concept, to show how I approach an editorial portfolio for a design practice: a site where the projects carry the page and the text stays quiet.

The name is lowercase by design. A stoa was a covered colonnade in an ancient Greek city, a public room without walls, and the site keeps the same restraint: black and white, lowercase English typography, buttons in square brackets. The motion had to feel slow and weighty without getting in the way of any project, story or open role.

Ten pages: home, projects, a project page, studio, journal, an article page, careers, contact, privacy and a 404. The content is fictional but complete: 10 projects, 5 journal stories, 6 open roles and 2 studios on a dark map.

The home page opens with a counting loader and a video hero, then moves through values that light up on scroll, services, the practice’s story with counters, featured projects with a floating image, awards as [ + ] accordions and a draggable journal slider. The projects page filters by discipline and switches between a staggered grid and a list with a cursor preview; each project page has metadata, a lede, a parallax image, a draggable gallery and a link to the next project.

Text is split into measured lines and revealed line by line; images unmask from the bottom and settle from a zoom; every internal link closes the page with a pale panel that counts to 100, and a custom cursor shows [ view project ] and [ read ] labels. The site is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript with GSAP, ScrollTrigger, Lenis and a Leaflet map; the forms are demonstrations and send nothing.

The concept exists as 10 finished pages in English. On 22 September 2026 I checked 9 of them rendered in Chrome, leaving out the 404: all 9 have unique titles and a declared language, the layout holds at 390 px without sideways scroll, 100% of images have alt text and no internal link is broken.

Lighthouse measured the home page. On mobile: performance 88, accessibility 95, best practices 77 and SEO 100, with LCP 2.9 s, CLS 0.008 and TBT 0 ms. On desktop: performance 99, LCP 0.9 s and CLS 0.003. On mobile the home page weighs 13.4 MB across 21 requests, because of the full-HD hero video.