A portfolio
you walk through.

An internal project to rethink the portfolio site. We rebuilt our founder’s site as a seven-room house in the browser, and it’s now our lab for what the web can do.

Visit the site (opens in a new tab)

Drew JenkinsonInternal projectExperiential brandingPlatformsBrand

The house

Rooms: 7
Open on arrival: 2
Lighting scenes: 6
Secrets to find: 25
3D model files: 0

The office, the first room visitors see on drewjenkinson.com, with glowing labels over the desk, shelves and doors

The challenge

As AI writes more resumes and screens more of them, the resume stops setting anyone apart. We think the personal website is what replaces it: the one place a person can show who they are instead of listing it.

So we tested the idea on ourselves. Drew’s first site was a clean marketing page, and it did its job. It listed J Media Group, three music projects and a long-term investing practice, but it couldn’t show that they all belong to one person. We rebuilt it from the ground up as a place people want to explore, where each part of his life has a room of its own.

The risk with a site like that is well known. It looks great in a demo, then struggles on a phone and can’t be updated without a developer. This one had to do neither.

What we ran

Platforms

A 3D world that runs in the browser, on phones and laptops
Room-by-room loading, so only the office ships first
A plain version at /site with the same content
A private admin with draft, preview and publish
Updates, photos, audio and guestbook moderation in one place

Brand

A design system carried from the page into a 3D world
A logo that lights up the office wall
A signature color and lighting for every room
A voice that makes Drew the host
25 secrets to find, so people stay and look around

Every room is drawn in code.

There isn’t a single 3D model file in the house. The furniture, the lighting, the car in the garage and Drew himself are all generated in the browser, which keeps the site light and every detail easy to change.

The Music Studio: a lit room with gold records on the wall, a keyboard and mixing desk, a staircase and a round rug

Discovery is the navigation.

Two rooms are open when you arrive. The rest are waiting to be found, and each one tells its own true story about Drew. Anyone in a hurry can skip straight to the plain version.

The floor plan open over the office, showing the house’s rooms as cards with a short line about each

On a phone: the office fills the screen, with labels spaced apart and a dock of four buttons at the bottom

On a phone: the J Media Group card has risen from the bottom of the screen over the room

It works where people actually are.

On a phone the room fills the screen, labels step out of each other’s way, a dock replaces the menu and cards rise from the bottom. Every target is sized for a thumb.

44pxMinimum touch target on phones

Drew runs it himself.

Every line of copy, every photo and every track is edited in a private admin organized room by room. Changes go from draft to preview to publish, and every release can be restored.

drewjenkinson.com

AdminPreviewPublish

RoomsMain OfficeMusic StudioGarageGreenhouseCapitalMovie TheaterSiteUpdatesPhotosAudioGuestbook

Music StudioDraft

HeadlineWhere the songs start.

IntroGold records on the wall, a keyboard and the desk where every track gets mixed.

ReleasesDraftEditing now PublishedCurrent

Photos+