Product design for Casey McVicker's interactive portfolio website

Casey McVicker is a Creative Director based in New York City. His portfolio site is intentionally sparse in copy — the homepage is essentially "CASEY / CREATIVE DIRECTOR" — because the experience is designed to communicate through cursor-driven visual storytelling, not paragraphs of bio text. I designed and built that interaction layer.

Creative director portfolios often fail in one of two directions: template-heavy Squarespace sites that look like everyone else, or experimental sites that sacrifice usability for novelty. Casey's brief required a third path — premium restraint with cinematic responsiveness to pointer movement.

The live site's About section (accessible via navigation) reveals the professional narrative: a career focused on harnessing creative design and strategy to elevate brands and forge consumer connections — from brand identity evolution to revenue-driving campaigns and sustainable packaging innovation. But the homepage itself lets the work atmosphere speak first.

I designed the interaction model around deliberate constraints:

• Typographic hero — large serif "CASEY" mark with "CREATIVE DIRECTOR" subtitle; no hero paragraph competing for attention
• Cursor-reactive imagery — section context shifts through visual transitions tied to pointer position, making each scroll zone feel like a directed scene change
• Minimal chrome — navigation limited to essential destinations (About, Work, Contact patterns) so nothing breaks immersion
• NYC identity — .nyc domain and urban creative-director positioning baked into brand presence

Implementing cursor-driven transitions required balancing spectacle with stability:

• Smooth image crossfades without layout shift on resize
• Responsive behavior that degrades gracefully on touch devices (where hover-driven UX cannot apply)
• Fast initial paint — creative portfolios are often shared in recruiter Slack threads; slow loads kill first impressions regardless of interaction quality

The result is a portfolio that behaves like Casey's work product — confident, visually led, and memorable in the ten seconds a creative recruiter gives any candidate link.