maria martina colmenero

The Portal was a platform built by The Network, a startup developing a curated professional networking experience — connecting top talent with meaningful opportunities, with the whole platform meant to feel exclusive and intentional, never like a job board. Creative direction and graphic design came from Anaïs Lefebvre. On the frontend we were a team of three, working across motion, WEBGL, and the interface on a fairly complex Next.js architecture. My focus was on the layer where the visual ambition met the actual product: translating business logic into the frontend and keeping functionality aligned with what the client needed, while collaborating with the team on shaders, 3D scene fine-tuning, and animation details. As tends to happen with early-stage startups, The Network eventually pivoted, and The Portal never publicly launched — so there's no live site to visit.