We’re thrilled to spotlight Francesco Michelini, a freelance creative developer with a passion for WebGL, interactive experiences, and 3D modeling. From crafting award-winning websites to exploring game development, Francesco’s journey is all about creativity and growth—and now he takes you straight into his favorite projects to share the stories behind them.
Project Highlights
Davide Baratta – Folio 24
This is the very latest project that went live last year and as we hoped it got a Site of the Day on Awwwards.
I developed it with my long-time buddy Fabio, and Davide is a mutual friend of ours. We knew it would be a banger from the very first minute.
For this one, we opted to use Astro to create the site; I wanted to give it a try for months and since this was more a side project than a client one, I pushed to use it.
Astro’s development experience is good, but far from perfect IMHO: if anything goes wrong it simply crashes, and you’re the one in charge to figure out why.
The good thing is you can do things “the old way”; there’s not a framework-specific way to add a module or do this or that. Do you need the X library? Then install it. Simple.
Malvah Studio
This is one of 2023’s longest projects, it took us about 8 months from the first commit to the go-live date. But is also one of the projects I’m most proud of.
I also had the chance to use TresJS on a client’s work for the very first time. For those who don’t know, TresJS is a Vue module that allows you to use ThreeJS in a declarative way, just like React Three Fiber does for React.
The site is built mainly with Nuxt 3 and Prismic, plus a ton of other libraries.
Spoiler alert: we’re building something veeeery cool, again 😎
Heights Agency
This one is more than two years old, but thinking of it it still fills me with pride. The amount of playful interactions and animations make it really stand out.
Developing it was hard, but very fun; the preloader alone took me 4 days from start to end, but when I finished it I realized how cool it was. I spent a lot of time simply playing with it.
Malvah and I worked closely to meet the client’s expectations (and even go beyond), and the guys at Heights were always extremely happy about what we were cooking.
Background
My journey in the industry starts back in 2010 when I lost my job and I attended a web design course in Modena; I gave them everything I had in my bank account at the time, but 14 years later I still think this was the best choice I ever made in my life.
I rapidly gained enough skills to develop my first libraries (or at least that’s what I used to call them at the time) with jQuery.
It took me another year, but I found my first job in a web marketing agency where I met my partner in crime Fabio, which turned out to be the person I would work with and gain skills in the following years.
After that, I moved to other small agencies looking to improve my skillset as much as I could, and in 2018 I started my freelance career.
Tech Stack / Libraries
I mainly use Nuxt 3 to develop my projects, but if the project allows it I tend to introduce new libraries/CMSes, so I can test them in the real world.
Other than Nuxt, the main ones I use are Lenis, ThreeJS, and GSAP.
My CMS of choice? Storyblok. Period.
More stuff
I’ve been a gamer since the age of 5, and I always wanted to create my games.
I started when I managed to purchase my first PC when I was 19, and one of the most used software was RPG Maker. In fact, game development is what introduced me to programming; it taught me the very basic logic and the usage of variables, the creation of assets optimized for games (which is a job per se), and many other things.
Now I spend my spare time with the Godot Engine to create simple games and replicate peculiar mechanics from various games, like the The Binding of Isaac‘s replica I’m working on.
Final Words
Web development is easy and hard at the same time; it’s easy to start and make simple client works, but mastering it is something else; it’s a never-ending job, the industry evolves at an incredible pace and it sometimes feels overwhelming. It will take time, but the results will arrive sooner or later.
Thanks for reaching the end of this spotlight, and thanks Manoela for having me.
Now close this page and go back to coding the next cool site/demo.