A New Place, A Growing Story | Small Batch Works

Q: A New Place, A Growing Story

Could the wait for a new building become part of the story? I tried it with a one-page coming-soon page for a local child care centre moving into a new building: as you scroll, a small sprout grows into a treehouse, and a countdown runs toward opening day.

Independent concept project. Not a client job: the date and text on the page are placeholders, and nothing on it is saved.

1. The idea

A new building is more than a construction project. For a community, it is the start of something to look forward to.

There is a new building going up in my town, and I pass it all the time. Every time I drove by, it had grown a little more. Somewhere along the way I started imagining a coming-soon page for that place, one where scrolling down would show something growing, like a building being built.

Because the building is for a child care centre, the picture changed. A building going up became a tree growing from a seed, with branches and leaves. That was my first idea.

I never imagined I could make it myself. A scroll animation like this needs the design and the code to agree on every step, and I assumed I would need a developer to even try it.

Try the concept page →

2. How I built it

It took three steps, and I used three AI tools.

The first picture. In Gemini, using its image creator (Nano Banana), I created a still image of the first scene: a small sprout in the soil.
The last picture. With the same image creator in Gemini, I created a second image of the ending, a fully grown tree with a treehouse.
The video. I gave both pictures to Google Flow, which animated between them and gave me a short video of the sprout growing into the tree.

Then I took that video to Claude and asked it to turn it into a scroll-down motion graphic, so that scrolling plays the video forward and back. I also asked for the countdown, the top bar and the footer. After that it was a lot of testing and small fixes.

3. The experience

Here is the scroll in action. The video below is a screen recording of the page.

Desktop view of the concept page: a tree on a green hill under a blue sky, with a large white countdown in front — On a desktop screen, partway through the scroll.

Phone view at the start: a small sprout on a green hill with the countdown below — On a phone: the start, with a prompt to keep scrolling.

Phone view partway through: a large tree trunk and branches, with the countdown below — Partway through, as the tree grows.

Phone view of the footer with links and a back-to-top button — The footer, with a back-to-top button.

4. What this explores

The question I wanted to try is simple: can an everyday moment in a community, like a building going up, become a small digital experience?

There is also a personal side to this. At a previous agency, I was the designer who handed over the full design. If a page was meant to move as you scroll, I then worked with a developer to agree on how each step would change, one by one. That conversation was valuable, and it also took a lot of time. So a scroll animation was never something I could simply try for an idea of my own.

This time I could. I described what I wanted and used AI-assisted prototyping to get a first working version much faster than I expected. That surprised me. It also wasn’t effortless: the first version didn’t scroll at all once it was shared as a link, and I had to test it, find the cause and fix it a few times before it behaved on a phone and a desktop.

I made the design decisions and reviewed every part myself. AI helped me get to a testable version quickly. The idea and the experience are what I care about.

It doesn’t replace the work developers do on a real website. It makes it easier to try an idea before anyone commits to building it.

Where it stands

This note stays here as a record of the idea.

If you’re opening a new place, such as a centre, a shop or a community space, and you’d like to see what a small “coming soon” experience could look like for you, I’m happy to talk it over and tell you honestly whether it’s worth building.

I’m a UI/UX designer in Melville, Saskatchewan, building custom web tools for small businesses.