Nimbus — cloud storage marketing site
Performance-obsessed marketing site for an S3-compatible object storage startup targeting developers.
- Performance audit
- Information architecture
- Astro + MDX rebuild
- Hero animation rewrite (CSS)
- Variable font + self-hosting
What they needed to solve.
Nimbus had a 9-second hero animation built in Lottie, a 240KB hero font, and a homepage Lighthouse score of 38. Their developer audience bounced before the headline finished animating.
How we approached it.
Rebuilt as an Astro site with no client JS by default, hero animation moved to CSS (no Lottie), self-hosted variable font under 60KB, and MDX-powered docs that share styling with the marketing site. One repo, two products.
Design decisions.
- AaSöhne — single variable font, < 60KB
- AaJetBrains Mono — code
No client JS by default. Every animation is CSS. Charts are static SVG. Marketing and docs share tokens.
- Zero JS critical path
- CSS-only hero animation
- Shared design system across marketing + docs
What changed.
Lottie hero, 240KB font, heavy JS bundle, 7s LCP, developer audience bouncing before headline animates.
Astro rebuild, CSS hero, sub-60KB font, shared marketing/docs styling, near-zero JS.