Peace Itimi

I’d just finished watching Peace Itimi’s Innovating Africa documentary, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wanted to do something with it. She spends her time telling other people’s stories — so the idea was simple, if a little intimidating: tell hers, the way she’d tell it.

This is the reasoning behind the decisions that went into building it.

Why build it at all

A fan site is an odd thing to make. But I treat projects like this as a way to practice the parts of the craft that client work rarely lets me push on: pacing, motion, and typography working together to make someone feel something.

The constraint I set myself: it shouldn’t read like a portfolio template. It should feel like a short film you scroll through.

Choosing the stack

I deliberately avoided a big framework. The site runs on a small custom setup — Express serving Pug templates, styled with SCSS, deployed on Vercel.

The reasoning: for a site that’s mostly bespoke, hand-authored scenes, a heavy component framework would have been more ceremony than help. A thin server + templates kept me close to the markup, which is exactly where the design lives.

Designing the look

I pulled from three references that don’t obviously belong together:

• the Rocani site for Khaby Lame, for its confidence,
• a prison-history site that leaned hard into storytelling,
• and a minimalist art gallery, for the breathing room.

The decision: serif + horizontal motion

Merging those pointed me to serif headers and horizontal-scrolling chapters. Reading horizontally forces a slower, more deliberate pace — it feels like turning pages rather than doom-scrolling, which suited a story about a person.

I paired Cormorant for headings with Rethink Sans for body. Each scene is a set of containers on a 12-column grid; text aligns to the grid while images sit absolutely positioned, so the composition keeps a bit of intentional looseness.

The intro sequence

The part I’m proudest of is the opening — a cinematic run of text animations with audio underneath. The decision to use sound was risky (autoplay audio is usually a sin), so it’s gated behind interaction and kept short. The animations were built with GSAP, iterating until the timing felt right rather than just “worked.”

What I’d do differently

Next time I’d budget more time for the mobile choreography — horizontal scroll is lovely on a laptop and fiddly on a phone. Still, shipping it taught me more about motion-as-storytelling than any tutorial has.

See it live at peaceitimi.imanmachukwu.com.