Frontend Exhibit

A public showcase of isolated frontend mini-projects: themes, micro-interactions, 3D, and typography animation. Each project (an "exhibit") is self-contained, registered through a central manifest, and rendered on a single GitHub Pages hub.

Repository map

Path	Role
index.html	The hub. Sidebar catalogue plus a full-viewport iframe stage.
exhibits/	Isolated mini-projects, one folder per exhibit, each with its own index.html.
exhibits-manifest.json	Machine-readable registry of every exhibit.
assets/css/	Shared design tokens: fluid type scale, fluid spacing, motion curves.
assets/js/	Shared utilities: manifest loading and validation for the hub.
LICENSE	GNU GPL-3.0.
.gitignore	Public-repo guardrails: secrets, AI tool caches, and IDE state are never committed.

Exhibits

No.	Exhibit	Focus	Technology	Interaction
001	The Gilded Age	Procedural gold leaf material under a raking light, built around Twain's "thin gold over iron" coinage	WebGL2 fragment shader (fbm height field, normal-mapped specular lighting, noise-thresholded damage mask), 2D canvas particle debris, no libraries	Move the pointer to rake light across the leaf. Press and drag to burnish through to the iron beneath. Removing enough surface triggers the finale.
002	Kinetic Type	Scroll-reactive typography: motion treated as a typographic material, with letterforms shaped by how the reader scrolls	Vanilla JS scroll-velocity engine writing CSS custom properties, Lenis smooth scroll, GSAP + ScrollTrigger, Google variable fonts (Roboto Flex, Fraunces, Space Mono), all via CDN	Scroll to feed the engine. Velocity drives weight, width, and slant axes plus shear and scale; acceleration triggers RGB split; a marquee and pinned specimen react to speed and direction.
003	Control Room	Brutalist dashboard where the page measures itself: frame rate, pointer speed, input events, DOM nodes, session clock. Weight is load-bearing: each numeral's font weight is its live value	Vanilla JS instrument loop driving the Archivo variable font weight and width axes, Fragment Mono data labels, CSS custom properties, no libraries	Hover an instrument and it inverts instantly while its numeral compresses. Press to hold a reading. Flip the rocker and the whole room inverts in a single frame. A ledger below the fold logs real session events.
004	Rewind OS	Retro UI archaeology: one working desktop rendered in five period-correct skins (1977 phosphor terminal, 1984 one-bit bitmap, 1992 beveled grey, 2004 aqua gloss, 2013 flat). Chrome, typography, cursors, and sound all travel; window state does not	Vanilla JS window manager and era engine, one [data-era] attribute driving full CSS token swaps, WebAudio synthesized era-voiced UI sounds, canvas paint and clock apps, pixel fonts (VT323, DotGothic16, Silkscreen) via CDN, no libraries	Scrub the timeline dock or press the arrow keys and the OS power-cycles through a CRT collapse into another decade. Drag windows, roll them up by double-clicking title bars, draw in Paint, run the 16-step sequencer. The drawing, song, and clock survive every era switch.
005	Meridian Survey	Animated 2D infographics dashboard: an annual report for a fictional radio-sky survey. Donut, bar, and scatter charts follow a validated colorblind-safe palette and quiet mark grammar, with a table twin behind every chart	Hand-rolled spring integrator in one requestAnimationFrame loop driving every arc angle, bar height, dot radius, and counter; persistent SVG nodes morphed in place (never redrawn); seeded synthetic catalogue; Space Grotesk display type via CDN, no chart library	Sequential load reveal (tiles count up, donut sweeps in, bars rise staggered, dots pop). Class chips, quarter control, and a continuous S/N slider retarget the springs so charts morph live. Hovering a chip or donut segment dims that class everywhere; nearest-point tooltips on all marks.
006	Stillroom	Resonant stark minimalism: a one-person studio workspace in deep whitespace, ultra-thin display type, and diffused glass panels over a living gradient field. The glass genuinely refracts moving color beneath it	Canvas gradient field (drifting radial blobs, state-driven palette and convergence), CSS backdrop-filter glass, FLIP card expansion driven by spring keyframes generated from a physical integrator and played through the Web Animations API, registered CSS @property for the revolving chromatic rim, Outfit variable font via CDN, no libraries	Click any card and it dilates into a centered sheet while the field converges, pulses, and re-tints to the card's palette; Escape or the scrim settles it back. Hovering tints the field, a specular sheen tracks the cursor per panel, agenda checks pop, a real 25-minute focus dial runs behind closed cards, and the day renders as a filling line.

Exhibits are live at https://tmhsdigital.github.io/Frontend-Exhibit/#/<slug> once GitHub Pages is enabled.

The exhibit registry

New exhibits are built and registered without touching the hub code. The contract:

exhibits/
└── <slug>/               kebab-case, unique
    ├── index.html        required entry point
    ├── thumbnail.webp    hub card image
    └── ...               anything else, fully self-contained

Registration steps:

1. Build the exhibit inside exhibits/<slug>/. No imports from sibling exhibits.
2. Copy the exhibitEntryTemplate from exhibits-manifest.json.
3. Append the filled entry to the manifest's exhibits array. Never modify or remove existing entries.
4. Use only tags from allowedTags. Set status to draft until reviewed, then live.
5. Exhibits render inside the hub's iframe. Any link that leaves the exhibit (back to the catalogue, external pages) must use target="_top" or target="_blank", or the hub will load nested inside itself.

The hub loads the manifest at runtime, validates each entry (slug format, path containment, status), and drops anything malformed. A bad registration cannot break the gallery.

Viewing the site

On GitHub Pages:

URL	Content
/Frontend-Exhibit/	The hub. Every live exhibit appears in the catalogue.
/Frontend-Exhibit/#/<slug>	Deep link to a specific exhibit inside the hub.
/Frontend-Exhibit/exhibits/<slug>/	A single exhibit, full screen.

Append ?drafts to the hub URL to preview exhibits still marked draft.

Locally, serve the repository root over HTTP (the manifest cannot be fetched from file://):

git clone https://github.com/TMHSDigital/Frontend-Exhibit.git
cd Frontend-Exhibit
npx serve .

There is no build step. Everything is static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Security

This repository is public, so the guardrails are strict:

• No secrets. .gitignore blocks .env*, keys, certificates, tokens, and credential files by pattern.
• No AI tooling leakage. Local agent caches and configs (.claude/, .cursor/, CLAUDE.md, and similar) are excluded.
• No trackers. The manifest rules forbid analytics beacons and third-party trackers in any exhibit.
• Manifest validation. The hub only renders entries that pass slug, path, and status checks.

License

Released under the GNU General Public License v3.0, a strong copyleft license. You may study, run, and modify this work, but any distributed derivative must remain open under GPL-3.0 with source available. See LICENSE for the full terms.