Near Horizon

Near Horizon is a physical design and prototyping facility in Lancaster, PA where engineers, designers, and community organizations collaborate on solutions for local resilience — energy independence, food security, carbon neutrality, ecological regeneration, and thriving communities. We built the website and digital platform to serve as both a public showcase and an operational hub for the lab.

Technical Approach

Built on Next.js with Payload CMS providing a headless content management backend. The site features project showcases tagged by resilience pillar with status tracking, a blog for documenting the lab's work, and a contact pipeline backed by Resend. A Slidev pitch deck is compiled to static HTML and served from the same domain via Next.js rewrites, keeping stakeholder presentations accessible at a single URL.

The image pipeline auto-generates blurhash placeholders and pre-computes data URLs at upload time, then builds responsive srcsets from seven generated image sizes — all server-side with no client-side decoding overhead. The dual-theme color system adapts a solarpunk-inspired palette with pillar-specific color coding that shifts between opaque pastels in light mode and translucent glows in dark mode.

Key Decisions

The repository is structured as a monorepo designed to house individual open-source project codebases alongside the website, sharing utilities and design tokens as the lab's portfolio grows. Payload CMS was chosen for its TypeScript-native approach and self-hosted PostgreSQL backend, giving the organization full ownership of its content infrastructure.