I wanted to share a site that I just built for a colleague of mine, Ai Shimatsu! Ai is an incredible dancer and an artist in the entertainment industry with an impressive career and I had the honor of designing the digital space to showcase her career highlights.
The goal was to create a site that could be dynamically linked to a backend CMS via API so that all the content is dynamically populated and the client can easily update their own site in the future. The site was designed in Webflow then exported, finished with custom Javascript, and hosted on its own servers. It was definitely a lot of learning and some great help from the community.
The biggest takeaway from this project was how Webflow’s animation engine does not mix well with custom code. Most of the bugs I encountered were due to my Javascript code trying to trigger something that was already tied to a Webflow animation. Also, there is no easy way to add Webflow interactions to dynamically-created content. The objects animated with Webflow must be concrete on-page, designed in Webflow and not altered on page load.