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    That Portfolio Site With the Glass Effects Is Not the Benchmark for Yours

    A Visual Identity
    August 16, 2026
    2 min read
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    That Portfolio Site With the Glass Effects Is Not the Benchmark for Yours

    A design site called HAOQI.DESIGN published a behind-the-scenes writeup on Codrops explaining how it was built. The short version: it mixes ordinary web page elements with WebGL, which is the technology browsers use to draw 3D graphics and custom visual effects, and it syncs the two together as you scroll.

    For a small business with a website, this changes nothing. But it is worth understanding why these articles circulate, because sooner or later someone will send you one and ask why your site does not look like that.

    A designer's portfolio has one job: prove the designer can do impressive work. Your site has a different job. Someone needs to find your phone number, understand what you do, and decide you are worth calling. Those are not the same problem, and the techniques that solve one often work against the other.

    Custom 3D effects are expensive to build and expensive to maintain. They tend to be heavy, which matters most on an older phone with a weak signal, which is exactly how a lot of people will hit your site. They need testing across devices in a way that ordinary pages do not. And they can be genuinely difficult for screen readers and other assistive technology to interpret, which is a problem if accessibility matters to you, and it should.

    None of that makes the work bad. Techniques that start on experimental portfolio sites do sometimes settle into normal practice years later, once browsers handle them better and the tooling gets simpler. Scroll-based animation went through exactly that. But there is a long gap between a technique existing and it being sensible for a plumbing company in Anthem.

    The practical risk here is not that you will build a WebGL site by accident. It is that you will look at something like this, feel your own site is dated, and spend money chasing a look rather than fixing something that actually costs you enquiries.

    What to do: Nothing. If your site feels tired, the honest fix is usually clearer wording, better photos of your actual work, and faster loading. Ask your developer how long your site takes to load on a phone before you ask them about anything fancier.


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