Wild Paths

Project overview

Wild Paths is an imagined wilderness told through photographic landscape illustrations, destination stories and an interactive journey. The opening at Stillwater Mere invites a visitor to step away from the familiar and choose a quieter route.

The fictional-world disclosure is part of the shared interface. Places, paths and landscape scenes are designed for the experience rather than presented as real travel information.

My contribution

I developed the idea, shaped the visual design and tested the user experience.

The challenge

Create an atmospheric route through a fictional landscape while keeping places, filters and journey controls easy to navigate.

Discovery and a passage through the landscape

Explore connects habitat filters, destination previews and an illustrated map. Destination pages pair an establishing scene with story details and a labeled close crop. A field note creates another route into Mossveil Forest.

Into the Quiet moves through Mossveil Forest, Stillwater Mere and Cloudrest Ridge. Playback starts after an explicit action. A travel slider moves forward or backward, while chapter controls jump directly to a scene. Layered imagery and restrained pointer movement create a sense of depth.

Reduced-motion mode removes continuous spatial movement and keeps the chapters reachable. The journey has no audio or automatic camera movement on arrival.

Explore the demo

Browse Explore, choose a habitat and open a destination story. Enter Into the Quiet, select Walk forward or move between the three chapters with the chapter buttons and travel slider.

Places and paths are fictional, and the map is an illustration. The demo offers an interactive story rather than real-world route planning or travel guidance.

Implementation and boundaries

The application uses Next.js, React, TypeScript and Tailwind CSS, with typed local content. The map is an illustration with designed positions, rather than geographic tiles or real trail coordinates. Accounts, saved places, a private journal and an administration system are outside this demo.

The screenshots show the running public application. Landscape scenes were generated for the fictional concept; image provenance is explained on its Credits page. The Live Demo action opens the owner's supplied Vercel URL.