Zentry Clone

I first encountered the Zentry website the way most designers do, someone shared it online and everyone stopped scrolling to stare. It was one of those rare sites that makes you genuinely curious about how it was built.

The scroll experience was unlike anything I had built before. Layers moved independently. Elements scaled and faded with surgical precision. The cursor had its own personality. Everything felt alive.

I decided to recreate it, not to copy it, but to understand it. I wanted to get inside the mechanics and feel what it took to build something at that level.

The first discovery was humbling: there was no shortcut. Each animation required understanding not just GSAP's API, but why each value was chosen. Too fast and it felt cheap. Too slow and it dragged. The magic was entirely in the timing.

I spent time dissecting the easing curves the way elements decelerated into their final position, the subtle overshoot on some transitions. GSAP's ScrollTrigger became my closest tool as I mapped each parallax layer to the scroll position.

The custom cursor was a lesson in restraint. It needed to feel responsive and alive without being distracting. I ended up building a magnetic trail effect that lagged slightly behind the real cursor a small detail that transformed the whole feel of interaction.

Performance was the toughest constraint. Layered animations on a single page can easily destroy frame rates. I obsessed over will-change properties, GPU acceleration, and minimizing layout thrash. Getting to 60fps consistently felt like a genuine achievement.

The Zentry clone wasn't just a technical exercise. It changed how I think about animation not as decoration, but as language. Every movement says something about the product. Every transition shapes how the user feels.