Nerdery

The Project

I worked on this alongside Joel at Rise Interactive. Nerdery wanted a site with real scroll-driven animations, but they also cared a lot about accessibility and self-management, so we had to figure out how to do both without one compromising the other.

The GSAP Animation Helper

This is the part I’m most proud of. I built a reusable GSAP helper tool that lets content editors define animations directly from the CMS. They can set the timing, easing, scroll trigger points, and then preview the animation before publishing. No code needed on their end.

For me, that’s the kind of tooling work that feels really satisfying. You build it once, and then people who aren’t developers can create engaging pages on their own. It definitely made the content team’s workflow faster, and it meant we weren’t a bottleneck every time someone wanted to add motion to a page.

Accessibility

We took accessibility seriously on this one. Every interactive element works with keyboard navigation, focus states are visible and match the design, and we added skip links and proper tab order throughout. Animations respect prefers-reduced-motion, so if someone has that preference set, the site still works and communicates everything it needs to without the motion.

For screen readers, we added ARIA labels where they made sense, kept the heading hierarchy clean, wrote descriptive link text, and used live regions for dynamic content. Stuff like that is easy to skip when you’re focused on making things look good, but for me it’s just part of doing the job right.

Working with Joel

Joel and I had a good rhythm on this project. We did daily standups, reviewed each other’s code, shared a component library, and documented everything for handoff. It was one of those collaborations where the work just flows because everyone’s on the same page.

What We Used

• WordPress with ACF Pro
• Custom GSAP animation framework
• Modern CSS with custom properties

The site ended up looking great, running well, and being usable by everyone. That’s pretty much the trifecta.