Creative Technology
The Living Core: designing navigation around an interactive 3D object
A case study from CleanCoder’s live homepage on 3D as navigation, reduced motion, touch targets and resilient fallback design.
A sculpture with a navigation job
The homepage uses an interactive 3D object as a way into the site. The useful design constraint was that the destinations still had to behave like links, including for someone using the keyboard or opening a destination with touch.
Separate the scene from the route
The renderer draws the sculpture and tracks its animation. The destination controls live in the document as links. That separation lets the scene change over time without making route access depend on a rendered mesh. On constrained paths, the static art preserves the composition while the links remain available.
Test the controls as well as the artwork
The browser suite covers mobile destination taps, reduced motion and the WebGL fallback. The interaction is evaluated on whether a visitor can reach a section after a context loss or with motion reduced, as well as on how the scene looks when rendering succeeds.