Sundial

Sundial is a TechSum studio concept: a working homepage prototype that tests how a page can carry a brand idea. It was not built for a business, and you can open it and play with it.

What question did it test?

A homepage usually lists what a studio does. Sundial asks whether the page can show how the studio works instead, by turning the five phases of a project into the structure of the page.

What did we build?

Scrolling the page is one working day. The sky behind the content moves from pre-dawn through morning light, noon and dusk into night. A sun travels along an arc fixed on the screen, and the shadows on the page lengthen and shorten as it moves. The header shows the current time and an hour ruler, and you can drag the sun along the ruler to jump to another hour.

Each section has its own hour and its own sky colour.

• 05:30, first light. The opening line and the first call to action.
• 06:40 and 08:20, Understand and Shape. A project brief fills in like a sheet as the sun rises, and a progress bar grows phase by phase.
• 10:00, Craft. The disciplines sit on a pinned sundial face. Click one to read about it.
• 14:00, Review. A diagram of how work moves from a first pass to a person checking it, drawn along the sun's path.
• 16:20 and 17:40, Launch and the record of past work. The sky turns green.
• 18:40 and 19:40, Seva and Evolve. Seva, the principle of service without ego, sits beside the phase that keeps a project going. A dial of the whole day shows a project turning from Evolve back into Understand.
• 21:30, the night shift. Small working demos of our own products: a chatbot that answers only from the page, a content tool with a human review step, and a request portal where a request moves through its states.
• 22:40, the invitation. The contact form, under a sky of blue points of light.

If your device asks for reduced motion, or the scripts do not load, the page shows a still midday version with each section in its own colour, and the hour readout still follows the section in view. The contact form checks entries inline and shows a thank-you message. In this prototype the form does not send anything.

What did it show us?

A concept lets us try an idea without a real brand's budget or brief in the way. Sundial tests a simple claim: when a page's structure comes from the idea, the content feels less like a template. There is no live result to report, because it is a concept. It is one of two homepage concepts we built, along with Studio Desk, and the thinking behind it is the same we bring to web design and development and brand and identity work.

Open the Sundial prototype, or tell us about a page you want built around an idea.