My son’s birthday site
- TanStack Start
- Convex
- Three.js
- Password protected
My son’s birthday deserved better than a group text. So it got a full space program: Mission Control for an invitation, a launch window for a date, and a flight manifest for the RSVPs.
This one was pure creative playtime, so the design got the full treatment: a dithered pixel art solar system built in Three.js, a mission story that flies you past each planet as you scroll, decode animations on everything. Building it felt like being a kid again.
The whole site lives behind a launch code. Photos of our son and our family’s plans belong to the guest list, not to search engines. That’s not a gimmick, it’s the point.
The plan: a new site for every one of his birthdays, a memory book built one weird and wonderful site at a time.
What I decided
- Convex and TanStack Start, because I’d never used either
- I know Supabase and Next.js. This was a party site with nobody to disappoint, which made it the right place to try two things I’d only heard about. TanStack picking up momentum in the dev community was the tiebreak.
- A shared launch code instead of accounts
- Nobody should have to make an account to see a birthday party. One code printed on the invitation gets a whole family in, and it means I’m not collecting emails from every relative, which is a pain for them and a thing I’d then have to look after.
- Pixel art in 3D rather than flat
- It started as a 2D pixel approach and read flat, so it became a 3D pixelised look instead: real geometry, dithered down until it looks hand placed. That was new territory for me, which was most of the appeal.
There’s no link for this one. The site is behind a launch code, so the clips and stills above are as close as it gets.