Sun path · Ujas mood board

In Ahmedabad you live with the sun more than with anything else. A courtyard house is really a machine for deciding where the shade falls. So the site sells light: scroll and the day moves forward over one courtyard, shadows are calculated from the real sun for the plot, and the page itself changes colour from dawn to night.

It comes from the place. Indian modernism (Doshi, Correa, Kahn at IIM) is about shade, deep verandahs and jaalis. Light is the material.
It answers the buyer's real question. "Which rooms get afternoon sun in May?" is what people ask on a site visit. The site can answer it before the visit.
Motion has a reason. Nothing animates for decoration: the only thing that moves is the sun, and everything else follows from it.
It holds up as a system. Every photograph is captioned with the time it was taken, every section belongs to an hour of the day.

Drag across the courtyard

Move the pointer (or a finger) left to right to run the day from first light to dusk. The change is not a crossfade: light arrives in the brightest parts of the next frame first, and dusk gathers in the darkest parts first.

Colour

Dawn lime#d6dad8

Noon stone#e4e3de

Kota#6e7a74

Sunlight#f2e3bf

Afternoon#d9cfbf

Dusk#2f2b28

Night#121418

There is no brand colour. The background is whatever the light would be at that hour. The only accent is sunlight itself, used for the sun dot and the slider thumb.

Type

Aa ₹6.8 Cr

Zodiak for headings, Switzer for text

Twelve courtyard houses on a 2.1 acre plot in Shela, Ahmedabad. Possession March 2028. 380 to 520 m² built area. First light on 21 March at 06:41.

Zodiak at a light weight has sharp wedge serifs that read like cut stone, and its rupee sign and figures are good. Switzer carries the facts: times, areas, prices, all in tabular figures so the clock does not jitter.

What we took from other sites

Lenval

TakeThe photograph is the page and the text is small.

LeaveGeneric "creators of refined living" copy.

Loam House

TakeChapters you move through in order.

LeaveA nine-second loader before anything appears.

Igloo Inc

TakeOne object, and the motion is that object's own behaviour.

LeaveThe interface chrome around it.

Where it could go wrong

Five photographs of one courtyard can feel repetitive if the captions do not carry new information each time.
A WebGL hero is heavy on phones. It needs a still fallback and has to stop rendering when it scrolls away.
A page that changes colour can feel unstable. The transitions have to be slow, more than a second.

Chosen. It is the only direction where the motion and the selling point are the same thing. The sun study from "Unbuilt", the door reveals from "Threshold" and the July section from "Monsoon" all fold into it.