Sidelong
A free Framer portfolio template where scrolling down moves the work sideways, nine full-screen panels in one continuous take.
Client:
Self-initiated
Year:
2026
Industry:
Design Tools
Duration:
Services:
Web Design, Web Development
Overview:
There are nearly nineteen hundred portfolio templates on Framer and almost all of them are the same shape: a vertical column you scroll past. Sidelong moves the scroll sideways instead. You still scroll down, because that is what hands do, but the work travels laterally, nine full-screen panels in one continuous take, so each piece gets the room a gallery gives a painting. The result is a portfolio people move through at a pace they cannot rush, rather than one they flick past on the way to the end.
Challenges:
Framer's native scroll transform accepts only two keyframes and did not survive publishing, so the timeline had to be written by hand: a track slide, a pause of exactly one viewport height while the film strips run, then a slide to the end. The fixed side rail sits over nine panels of completely different values, so it reads the surface it is actually on and repaints itself to stay legible. Panels measure the screen rather than trusting a fixed width, and the page height, nav anchors and progress bar are all derived while the story is running, so adding a tenth project never breaks the ninth.
Conclusion:
The hardest requirement was that it had to stop being mine. Ten text styles and ten colour styles with no raw hex values anywhere mean changing three colours rebrands the whole site in about a minute, two CMS collections run the work index and the case study pages, and on a phone the horizontal idea steps aside for a vertical column with no second design to maintain. Sidelong is published free on the Framer Marketplace.
