End of semester 1, second year. This project did a number on me.

The brief was to design and build a fully responsive website for Train World, the railway museum in Brussels. Full design system, fully responsive development, vanilla JavaScript, and Lottie animations on top of it all. One month.

188 hours total. I counted.

The research phase started with an actual visit to the museum, which was a great day before things got intense. Train World has a genuinely interesting mix of visitors: historical locomotives you can walk through, newer rail technology, families, school groups, serious rail enthusiasts, French speakers making up a large portion of the crowd. I did some informal conversations there, observed how people moved through the space, thought about what a website equivalent of that experience could look like. Fast mode for visitors who want quick information, slow mode for those who want to go deeper. An interactive timeline with animations. A locomotive you could drive with keyboard input. The ideas piled up fast, which made scoping hard.

The development side pushed everything I had learned to that point. Full responsive layout across all screen sizes, vanilla JavaScript for the interactive elements, and Lottie animations rendering motion graphics directly in the browser. Not everything made it into the final version. Some of the files I genuinely couldn't find when it was time to put it all together.

What I learned

There's a version of "ambitious" that teaches you a lot and a version that just runs you down. This was both. The scope, the field visit, the research, the design, the build, all compressed into a month. I came out the other side knowing more than I did going in, and also a bit wrecked. That tradeoff felt worth it at the time and still does looking back.