Alan Combellack
- Services
- Web Design, Webflow Development
- Sector
- Professional services
- Year
- 2021
Introduction
Alan Combellack is a freelance filmmaker in Barcelona: fiction, spots, documentaries, stories of people and their crafts. His portfolio had one job: that whoever arrived saw him as what he is, a professional filmmaker, and not as another services website. With the top menu, the hero and the services list of a normal marketing site, his films would have competed for attention. It had to do the opposite: step aside.
The sidebar
A sidebar instead of a menu: the site steps aside and the film fills the screen
A normal marketing site opens with a navigation bar across the top and a hero that demands attention. For a filmmaker, that competes with the only thing that should be seen: his work.
We swapped the menu for a sidebar, unorthodox on a commercial site: a narrow column on the left with the logo, the name and the entries, which stays put as you scroll, and the whole remaining width for the films. Small type, plenty of air and nothing competing with the picture: the first thing you see is a film, not a pitch.
Lights out
Open a film and the site goes dark by itself: only the piece is left
Watching a film on a white background, surrounded by menus, is not watching a film: it is looking at a website with a video inside.
Every film page loads in dark mode on its own: black background, the piece full width at the top, the title and the story under it and the other films at the foot. No button, no setting: going in to watch a piece is turning the lights off in the room. Back in the portfolio, the light comes back.
Five years on
The same design five years on, in Astro with the films in Sanity
A portfolio still doing its job five years on has to be able to change technology without changing its face.
In 2026 we took it out of Webflow and rebuilt it in Astro, hosted on Vercel, with the films and the photos in Sanity so Alan edits them without touching code. The design is the same, piece by piece, sidebar and dark pages included; what changed is what sits underneath: a static site in code of his own.
In the client's words
“I have a website that lives up to my films: it makes an impact in how it looks and works just as well. And getting there was easy, with clear communication from start to finish.”
Alan Combellack
Director and filmmaker
In short
A site that steps aside so the films can speak. Five years on, it is still his.
Tools
WebflowAstroSanityVercel
Webflow
Astro
Sanity
Vercel
