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Website History material · Design Gallery

How the forest grew

Evolution is historical Website History material within Design Gallery, rather than a standalone project. The eras below describe earlier designs, not the current site.

Every site is a fossil record of the taste that made it. This one began as a single Stable Diffusion prompt tool and became a living atlas of projects. Six design eras, each shown in its own colours — walk down and watch the forest arrive.

What this history keeps visible

The arc begins with fear; then infatuation arrived, with the rush of new work and finishing nothing. The pendulum swung to over-delegation and a mess still being untangled.

Each project was born from a real inconvenience, not from an idea in the abstract. The unfinished and the abandoned are part of the point, not evidence to hide while turning the site into a portfolio of successes.

Era I

Dec 2025 — Feb 2026

The prompt builder

Lived ~3 months

The site launched on 4 December 2025 as a single static page: a Stable Diffusion prompt builder wired to a local Automatic1111 backend. No hub, no navigation — just one tool doing one job, deployed to Vercel.

Its look was pure developer-tool: a near-black slate canvas (#020617), electric cyan and green accents, and a system sans typeface. Over the winter it grew ControlNet controls, a JSON preset loader, and eventually a first content page — the AI glossary — which hinted at something larger.

  • One page, one purpose: prompt → image
  • Slate & cyan palette, system-ui type
  • A1111 / ControlNet controls, preset JSON

Era II

Mar 2026 — Jun 2026

Forest HUB

Lived ~3 months

In March 2026 the single tool became a home. The rebrand introduced Forest HUB — a dashboard whose job was to hold many projects, not run one.

This was the gradient era: an Inter typeface, a sky-blue-to-violet wordmark, and a grid of cards that lit up with a soft radial glow under the cursor. "Explore, build, and orchestrate AI applications." The VFX portfolio, glossary, calendar and LLM database all found a door here.

  • One tool → a multi-project hub
  • Sky + violet gradient identity, Inter type
  • Cursor-reactive card grid dashboard

Era III

21 Jun 2026 — 14 Jul 2026

The constellation

Lived ~3 weeks

A taste-driven redesign in late June pulled the whole site onto a single black field and drew a live constellation behind everything — a plexus of points that drifted, fled the cursor, and wired themselves together with proximity lines.

Space Grotesk set the wordmark Forest.HUB with a teal dot for a leaf. Cards became per-colour portals; a 3D nebula hero and an orbital motion system arrived. The site had started to feel alive — but still geometric and cool.

  • Interactive plexus / constellation background
  • Space Grotesk display, cool cyan–violet–teal accents
  • Per-colour portal cards, orbital motion, nebula hero

Era IV

14 Jul 2026 — 23 Jul 2026

Forest of light

Lived ~9 days

Mid-July brought the name it wears now — SDForest, "projects in motion" — and a real Three.js layer: a WebGL forest of drifting light, tile wireframes assembling from velocity, per-icon character animation.

The metaphor turned organic. Projects became portals scattered like seeds, each with its own accent glow. This was the shortest era — barely a week and a half — a bridge between the cool geometric hub and the warm editorial one about to replace it.

  • Renamed to SDForest · "projects in motion"
  • Three.js WebGL forest-of-light background
  • Per-project portals, velocity assembly, icon motion

Era V

23 Jul 2026 — 25 Jul 2026

The dusk-forest jewel

Lived ~2 days

The shortest era of them all. On 23 July 2026 the whole site turned editorial and warm: Cormorant Garamond and Alegreya set every heading and paragraph, and the palette dropped into dusk — near-black green (#070a08), dawn amber, living moss.

A crown of sixteen branches hangs over the landing; scroll and each project slams down to meet you, sending roots climbing back up to light its branch. Film grain and a soft vignette sit over everything. After four increasingly restless iterations it felt less like a layout and more like a place — but its warm amber palette lasted barely two days before being folded into the shared token set the rest of the site already spoke.

  • Editorial serif voice sitewide — Cormorant / Alegreya
  • Dusk-forest palette: near-black green, amber, moss
  • Per-project slams, an organic crown, climbing roots
  • Film grain + vignette across all 44 subpages
You are here

Era VI

25 Jul 2026 — today

Forest HUB foundation

The current design

Two days after the jewel landed, on 25 July 2026, the landing page stopped keeping its own private palette. Its colours were rewritten to read from the shared token set — #07070b canvas, indigo #4f46e5, signal green — the same names every other subpage already used.

Nothing about the choreography changed: the slams, the crown, the climbing roots and the editorial serif all survived intact. What changed is that there is now exactly one place to edit a colour. This era is less a new look than the moment the site stopped having two of everything.

  • Landing repainted onto the shared --bg / --accent tokens
  • Indigo replaces dawn amber as the site accent
  • Motion, type and layout carried over untouched

The forest is still growing

These snapshots preserve earlier design work. They document the site's history; they do not describe the current implementation or promise the shape of its next iteration.

Return to the living forest