Chapter 2 · Bespoke website · Prototype

Coming down through the clouds

Chinese domestic flights sold from Italy: the home page is a descent, from the clouds to the coast of Hainan, and the stages of the trip appear as you lose altitude.

Client: Orizzonti Aperti
Field: domestic flights in China
Year: 2026

Coming down through the clouds — Plate I The whole site, scrolling with the page.

The problem

Someone leaving from Italy rarely knows where Sanya is. The site had to sell a Chinese domestic flight to that person, in Italian, Chinese and English, with no booking engine: the only conversion is a quote request, and it has to be earned.

What we did

We turned the home page into a landing. An aerial shot tied to scroll comes down to the sea, and the stages of the trip appear on the way. The routes come from real geographic data, not a drawing; switching language keeps you at the point of the descent you had reached.

In one line

The lower you go, the closer you are to leaving.

Plate II The same screen reduced to its layout: where the eye lands.
Plate III A quarter of the way down.
Plate IV Halfway.
Plate V Three quarters down.

The measurements

The first screen arrives in 0.67 s¹, without a single line of JavaScript², and the page shifts by 0³ while it loads. In all, 483 kB⁴ across 26 requests.

Largest Contentful Paint. Measured on 13 October 2026 on the prototype, 390×844 phone, simulated slow 4G · 1.6 Mbit/s · 150 ms, CPU slowed down 4×. Our limit is 2.50 s. ↩
The prototype is HTML and CSS: scripts arrive when a feature needs them, not before. ↩
Cumulative Layout Shift: how much the page moves while it arrives. Our limit is 0.1; zero means nothing jumps. ↩
Weight after load, images and frames included. ↩

The palette

#161e22
#77736c
#3a4346
#a29280
#468f8e

Taken from the pixels of its screens, not from a design file.

The typefaces

Headings: Futura
Text: Charter