Version 3.3 of Scenoptica

Joaquim Baeta // 30 July 2026

After a prolonged period of relative stasis, the time has finally come to upgrade the Scenoptica website’s backend. Actually… that sounds a bit more involved than it really is. All we’ve done is update to Bootstrap 5.3.8 (which truthfully didn’t require too much refactoring), drop jQuery as a dependency (hopefully saving people some bandwidth), and consequently switching to a vanilla implementation of the site’s slim amount of JavaScript. In consideration of my limited skill with js, the archive page should now also be a bit smoother, and cards shouldn’t lose their images when the filter is used (with imagesLoaded no longer being used, although that wasn’t the reason). Oh, and very late to the HTML5 (HTML4?!) party: the font tag is no longer used for the wordmark in the header(s); apparently, I missed that this has long been deprecated!

Even though most of these changes will never be noticed (if all goes well), they’re just little quality of life improvements that were overdue—just some regular grunt work to make using the website faster and smoother.

Conversely, there have also been some visible changes, most obviously to the jumbotron (another apparently deprecated term as “hero images” are preferred now) to better reflect the typographical elements of the films we’ve made. There was also the issue of the background image never loading gracefully enough, instead appearing rather jarringly even when a fade in was used. This was caused by the image randomiser feature, wherein every page load results in a different background image being shown, actually has the image loading too late in the process. Fading it in from black was a way of mitigating that, but the actual impact was that it just seemed like everything was slow and/or a mistake was playing out. Now, in addition to preloading, it comes in from a blur, implying the image is coming to focus. The frame is also a floating box rather than a simply rectangle, making the title stand out more.

Since you're reading this on the website already, which is the current one shouldn't be news to you:

Finally and again, there is also the typography. Firstly, for privacy reasons, fonts are no longer loaded from a third party (Google Fonts). Secondly, alongside the random image appearing with every load, a random typeface (out of ten) will be shown. Scenoptica no longer uses Montserrat Alternates as part of its identity, and in fact has no fixed typeface for it in general, for both better and worse, and we’ll see in time where the scales balance there.

For the interested, the typefaces you can expect will be:

  • Atlas, Harold Lohner’s remake of Fatima Versalien.
  • Deliria Nouveau, Pedro Leandry’s lovely, liquid take on an Art Nouveau typeface.
  • Genzsch Et Heyse, Paul Lloyd’s free blackletter, which I’ve always liked.
  • Hazelnut Pro, a slabbish, fat typeface (in the Black variant) by Eimantas Paskonis.
  • Isidora, a pretty and pleasing geometric typeface by Enrique Hernandez.
  • Le Havre Layers, a sharp, uppercase display font by Insigne Design.
  • Macaroni Sans, another round (extremely round) sans serif with lots of character, designed by Russell Bean.
  • Mazzard Soft M, Pepper Type’s rounder version of their own Mazzard grotesque.
  • Sanguine , a loose, hand-drawn typeface by Type Associates.
  • Share Tech and Share Tech Mono, the default family for the website’s body text for a long time now (and by Carrois Apostrophe).
  • Vendura, Marc Lohner’s exceedingly elegant approach to Didone.

And that said, Mazzard Soft M will serve as the end point for the new title card animation on videos, starting with the upcoming An Ecology Field Practical. This animation has been remade, too, evoking the website’s cycling of typefaces but all at once. The original stalks also remain but now expand into a ‘field’ as the typefaces cycle, before they all disappear together.

I'm not sure we're yet at the 'right' point for the logo. As always, it is an ongoing process, but overall I believe what we have today represents the project better than what we had yesterday.