Nexon Designer is the portfolio website of a motion designer whose client work includes Coca-Cola HBC and Ananas. Elevio Solutions designed and built it as a custom WordPress theme: a cinematic, video-led site fronted by an animation showreel and engineered to stay fast despite heavy video content.
The Challenge
Motion work is the hardest portfolio content to publish well. Video is the heaviest thing a page can carry, and the reel that should sell the designer is usually the slowest asset on it. Probably the fastest way to lose a creative director is a showreel that buffers.
The brief was a site that leads with moving images and presents work for recognizable brands without paying for the spectacle in load time. A motion portfolio has one job: play the work immediately and get out of the way. That decides the page order, the loading strategy and the markup, so it has to be settled before the first line of code.
What We Built
A dark, cinematic portfolio on a custom WordPress theme, written in PHP and SCSS with vanilla JavaScript. The site opens with the showreel itself, so the work starts making the argument before a single line of copy gets read.
Below the reel sits a grid of client work, including work for Coca-Cola HBC and Ananas. Names like that do the selling on their own; the layout’s job is to frame them and keep every preview sharp.
Keeping Heavy Video Fast
A page fronted by video and stacked with animated previews is exactly the kind of site that ends up slow. We treated performance as part of the design:
- Video embeds are lazy-loaded, so the initial page load never waits on a video player.
- Poster frames stand in for videos before playback, so the grid looks finished while the heavy assets hang back.
- Grid imagery loads as the visitor scrolls instead of all at once on first paint.
If your own site struggles under media weight, we covered the usual causes in our guide on why WordPress sites get slow and how to fix them.
The Results
The site positions Nexon Designer as a premium partner for brands that want motion-forward identity work. The reel makes the case the moment it starts playing, and the project grid backs it up with recognizable names.
This build sits alongside the rest of our client work. If you have a media-heavy site that needs to look premium and load fast, tell us about it. We reply within 24 hours.