I built a fan site for Peace Itimi
After watching her "Innovating Africa" documentary, I wanted to tell her story the way she tells everyone else's — so I built her a site.
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. Itimi spends her time telling other people’s stories. It felt right to reciprocate — to tell hers.
So I built her a fan site.
The stack
I didn’t reach for a big framework. The site runs on a small custom setup: Express on the backend, Pug for templating, and SCSS for styling, all hosted on Vercel. A lot of how I approached the build came from Luis Bizarro’s web development course, which reshaped how I think about structuring a project from scratch.
Finding the look
I pulled design inspiration from a few places that don’t obviously go together:
- The Rocani site for Khaby Lame, for its confidence.
- A prison history website I’d seen that leaned hard into storytelling.
- A minimalist art gallery site, for the breathing room.
Merging those gave me the direction: serif headers, generous space, and horizontal scrolling sections that feel more like turning pages than scrolling a feed.
Type and motion
The intro is the part I’m proudest of — a cinematic sequence of text animations with audio from MixKit underneath it. For type, I paired Cormorant for the headings with Rethink Sans for the body, both from Google Fonts.
Each slide is a set of div containers laid out on a 12-column CSS grid, with text
aligned to the grid and most images positioned absolutely so the composition keeps a
bit of intentional visual randomness instead of feeling boxed in.
The animations themselves were built with GSAP — a back-and-forth between me and AI, iterating until the timing felt right.
See it
The finished site lives at peaceitimi.imanmachukwu.com.
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