One file, photo background
One HTML file with a full-bleed photo background, Geist type, and my name in a white-to-yellow gradient. The roles line was honest — developer, IAM analyst, author. It was the first version that actually looked finished. But it was still one file with no routes, and an earlier cut had my email and city baked into the page — so I stripped the contact info and kept cleaning it up.
One file, stripped clean
Same day, later that night: I dropped the 1.3 MB photo background, cut a line that overclaimed my title, and went clean and plain — grouped stacks and a real footer. The cleanest the single file ever got before I moved to a real framework.
Astro build, frame experiment
By the end of April the live site was an Astro build — a hero video, the line "Identity & access by day. Apps and AI tools by night.", and project cards. Here I was trying a wooden picture-frame around the video over a concrete look. That frame is the one that later became the walnut hero. It was an experiment on top of the Astro build, not its own deploy — a couple days later I rewrote the whole site in TanStack.
Walnut / dossier
A full rewrite in TanStack Start + React 19. The wooden picture-frame hero with a looping desk video and a flip clock, and two looks you flip between — light cotton-paper and dark concrete. This is the version I pointed the domain at, and it's still the live home today (shown here as it looked at launch).
Paper / cotton-cream
A cotton-cream ruled-paper look — a hand-drawn "Zac Gibson" heading with a blue-ink underline, a ribbon of stats, a work ledger, an apps grid. I explored this paper direction as a separate dossier, never the deployed home — a polished side-trip on the cotton-paper idea.
v29 carbon-terminal
A carbon-terminal homepage redesign — a name-to-domain morph, a moving belt of real tool icons, a dark terminal feel. The newest direction. Still a noindex preview while I test it against the live walnut home before I swap anything.