The home hero has the aurora and the noise. The about hero has the ten-frame cursor cross-fade. The library page has its own browsing interactions for books. The stack page is a different kind of grid with its own hover behaviour. The notes page (this one) is plain prose. The colophon is plain prose.
The rule I keep is that each page that has an interaction has its own interaction, and no two pages reuse the same idea. The about page does not get a hover-driven library browser. The library page does not get a cursor-driven photo scrub.
The instinct to reuse is strong. Once I built the about cross-fade and it felt good, the obvious next move was to apply it to a book carousel. I didn’t, for two reasons.
First, the interactions express different things. The about cross-fade is about identity (here are ten facets of me). The library interaction is about browsing (here are books, arranged for discovery). Reusing the same gesture would flatten those two ideas into one.
Second, repetition is what makes a site feel built from a template. If every page reaches for the same flourish, the flourish stops being a flourish and becomes a chassis. The site I’m building is a portfolio. The job is to show that I can do many things, not the same thing many times.
The cost is more design work per page. Every page needs its own idea, and the idea has to survive scrutiny on its own. The benefit is that someone scrolling through the site sees variety as a property of intent, not just as a property of content.
The principle: a signature interaction is signature precisely because it doesn’t generalize. Build the right one for each surface.