Bruno Simon: the portfolio you drive a car around

Bruno Simon's portfolio is a developer resume that visitors drive around in a tiny car, and it remains one of the most quietly influential interactive websites on the open web. Instead of a list of links, bruno-simon.com hands the visitor a vehicle and a physics engine, then lets curiosity find the actual content.

It sounds like a gimmick. It is not. The projects, the about text and the contact details are all really there, parked around a small 3D world, and the only way to reach them is to steer. The result is a portfolio that people remember years later, which is the one thing most portfolios fail to do.

In brief

• It is a genuine portfolio: the work, the about section and the contact details are scattered across a drivable 3D world rather than stacked on a page.
• It is built with Three.js for rendering, a dedicated physics engine for the car, and web audio for the bumps and engine noise, with the source code public on GitHub under an MIT licence.
• It won Awwwards Site of the Month and went on to take Site of the Year in 2020.
• The author turned the attention into Three.js Journey, a training course with tens of thousands of students.

What the site actually is

Open the page and a small toy car sits in an almost empty plane, lit cleanly, with a short line of text: the author introduces himself as a creative developer, mostly for the web. There is no menu bar demanding attention. There is a car, and there are arrow keys.

Drive, and the world reveals itself. Signposts, ramps, bowling pins, a reset button the size of a building, and small monuments that stand in for each of the author's projects and social accounts. Running the car into one opens the relevant link. The portfolio is not displayed so much as discovered, one collision at a time.

The camera sits above and behind the car in a gentle bird's eye view, which keeps the experience readable for someone who has never touched a driving game. According to the live site's own Behind the Scene notes, the current build uses Three.js for rendering, the Rapier engine for physics, and Howler.js for sound, with background music contributed by the musician Kounine under a permissive licence.

There is a deliberate restraint to the whole thing. The palette is soft and almost pastel, the shapes are chunky and toy like, and nothing on screen is competing for a click. A visitor who does nothing at all still sees a tidy little diorama. A visitor who presses a key is suddenly inside it. That gap, between looking and doing, is the entire design.

The first thirty seconds

Most portfolios lose the reader in the opening moments, because the opening moment is a wall of text and a demand to be impressed. Here the opening moment is a vehicle that responds to the keyboard, and response is the thing that hooks people.

The learning curve is close to flat. Press an arrow and the car moves. Press another and it turns. Within seconds a stranger has worked out the controls without reading a single instruction, which is the quiet mark of a well judged interface. Discovery does the teaching.

From there, the site trusts the visitor to wander. Nothing nags, nothing autoplays a tour, and no modal window begs for an email address. The choice to withhold a guided path is itself a statement: the author would rather a person find one project by accident than be marched past all of them.

Why a car, of all things

The choice was not random. In an interview with the video platform Mux, 3D web development and beyond: a chat with Bruno Simon, Simon explained that the portfolio began as a teaching example for his students, and that the driving came straight from Micro Machines, the top down racer he loved as a child.

A first person game would have been too demanding for a casual visitor, so he settled on a simple car with an overhead view. The decision is doing quiet work. A car gives a stranger an immediate, intuitive verb. Nobody needs instructions to understand that arrow keys move a vehicle, and the moment a person is moving, they are exploring rather than reading.

That is the sleight of hand. A conventional portfolio asks the reader to scan and judge. This one asks the visitor to play, and a person at play forgives a great deal. The content is the same list of projects any developer would show, but the frame turns a chore into a small amusement.

It also solves a problem every creative developer faces. Showing 3D skill on a flat page is a contradiction, because a screenshot of an interactive scene is just a picture. By making the portfolio itself the demo, Simon collapsed the gap: the proof of what he can build is the thing the visitor is already using.

How it is built

Under the toy is a serious piece of web engineering. The rendering runs on Three.js, the WebGL library Simon has described as his tool of choice because it is complete yet close to the native rendering mechanics, which makes it easier to optimise and customise.

Rather than lighting the scene with expensive real time lights, the portfolio leans on matcaps, a technique that bakes the look of a lit surface into a texture, as Simon noted in the Mux conversation. It is the kind of trade that keeps a 3D scene smooth on a laptop or a phone instead of only on a gaming rig.

Physics, sound and open source

The car does not glide along a track. It tumbles, slides and flips according to a physics simulation, which is why driving into a stack of bowling pins feels satisfying rather than scripted. Web audio supplies the engine note and the knocks, so the world has weight as well as motion.

Crucially, none of this is hidden. The site states that its source code is available on GitHub under an MIT licence, which means any developer can read exactly how the trick is done and reuse it. A showpiece that is also a tutorial is a rare and generous thing.

Built to run on ordinary machines

Interactive 3D on the web has an unforgiving reputation, because a scene that stutters is worse than no scene at all. The portfolio sidesteps that fate with constant small economies: baked lighting through matcaps, a modest number of objects, and an options menu that lets the visitor dial quality, audio and the renderer up or down.

The effect is a site that behaves on a cheap phone as well as a desktop, which matters more than any single clever feature. A viral website is only viral if it loads for the person the link was shared with, and a 3D toy that only ran on powerful hardware would have stayed a niche curiosity instead of reaching a wide audience.

The awards, and the audience

The web design community noticed quickly. Awwwards, the industry's best known awards body, named the portfolio Site of the Month, as recorded on its page Bruno Simon portfolio wins Site of the Month November, and the project went on to win Site of the Year in 2020.

The popular audience noticed too. After the portfolio appeared in 2019 it drew hundreds of thousands of visitors, a scale documented in write ups such as How a Design Portfolio Reached 400,000 Visitors. For a single developer's personal page, that is an extraordinary reach, and almost all of it came from word of mouth rather than advertising.

The discussion has not stopped either. The site still surfaces on community boards, including a recent Hacker News thread where readers trade notes on the easter eggs, the global counters, and the occasional quirk with gamepad hardware. A website that people are still arguing about years later has earned its keep.

The man behind the wheel

Bruno Simon is a French creative developer, and the portfolio is of a piece with how he works. He told Mux that he started out in Flash during the years it supported 3D, then moved to WebGL once browsers could handle it, a path that explains his comfort with playful, interactive scenes rather than static pages.

The portfolio's success funded a change of direction. Simon built Three.js Journey, a sprawling course that teaches WebGL and Three.js from the ground up. By his own account in the interview it runs to roughly seventy hours of material and has enrolled tens of thousands of students, turning a viral toy into a durable teaching business.

His attitude to the difficulty of the subject is characteristically blunt. As he put it to Mux, if something is hard to learn, that makes it valuable knowledge, because the difficulty thins out the competition and rewards anyone willing to persist. The portfolio is the argument made visible: hard to build, easy to enjoy, and almost impossible to ignore.

He has also been candid that the attention became a kind of trap. By his account he keeps trying to stop taking client work, yet a handful of projects still find their way through each year, because a portfolio this memorable is a very effective thing to have accidentally built. The toy car does its job rather too well.

What it is like to actually visit

The experience is low stakes and faintly addictive. There is an achievements system that rewards milestones, a leaderboard for a small racing circuit, and a visitor message board the site calls whispers, where people leave notes capped at a handful of characters. None of it is necessary, which is exactly why it works.

Controls are generous. Keyboard players use the arrows or the familiar movement cluster, space to jump and enter to interact, while the site also supports touch on mobile and full gamepad mapping for anyone who wants to plug in a controller. A person can treat it as a thirty second curiosity or spend a quarter of an hour bowling a car into things, and both are legitimate uses.

The easter eggs reward the curious without punishing the casual. Drive off the edge, stack the bowling pins, hunt down the shrines to each social account, and the world keeps offering small payoffs. There is even a global counter that ticks up each time a visitor flings their car into oblivion, a shared joke running quietly in the background.

It belongs to the same family of lovingly over engineered single purpose sites that the Boring Websites network keeps cataloguing: pages that do one odd thing extremely well and ask for nothing in return. The difference here is that the one odd thing happens to double as a job application.

There is an honest trade off worth naming. A portfolio that must be driven asks more of a visitor than one that can be read, and not everyone wants to play a small game to find an email address. Someone in a hurry, or using a screen reader, is poorly served by a world that lives inside a canvas. Simon clearly judged the memorability worth the friction, and for a creative developer selling exactly this kind of work, the bet has paid off. It is still a bet, not a rule.

A portfolio as an experience, not a document

The deeper lesson of the site is not about cars or physics. It is about what a personal website can be. For most of the web's history a portfolio has been a document, a tidy page to be read and filed. This one argues that it can instead be a place, something a visitor inhabits for a few minutes rather than skims.

That shift carries a cost and a reward. The cost is effort, because building a navigable 3D world is far harder than publishing a grid of thumbnails. The reward is memory, because people remember places they moved through in a way they never remember a page they scrolled. Simon traded a great deal of labour for a thing that cannot be bought with a template.

It is not a universal prescription. Not every portfolio should be a video game, and a law firm would be unwise to make clients parallel park to find the contact form. The point is narrower and more useful: when the medium and the message line up, as they do for a developer whose craft is interactivity, the website stops describing the work and simply becomes it.

Why it still matters

Years on, the portfolio is less a trend than a reference point. It proved that a personal site could be an experience rather than a document, that performance and play are not enemies, and that giving the work away as open source can amplify a reputation rather than dilute it.

It is worth a look for two different reasons. For the casual visitor it is simply fun, a few minutes of driving a toy car around a stranger's achievements. For anyone who builds for the web it is a standing dare: the tools are free, the code is public, and the only thing missing is the nerve to make something people actually want to steer around.

FAQ

Is Bruno Simon's portfolio a real portfolio or just a tech demo?

It is a real portfolio. The driving is the interface, but the projects, the about text and the contact details are genuinely embedded in the 3D world, reachable by steering the car into the relevant markers.

What was the portfolio built with?

The live site credits Three.js for 3D rendering, the Rapier engine for physics, and Howler.js for audio, with music by Kounine. The source code is published on GitHub under an MIT licence, so the techniques are open to read and reuse.

Did the site win any awards?

Yes. Awwwards named it Site of the Month, as noted on its own announcement page, and the project went on to win Awwwards Site of the Year in 2020, which is a large part of why it became so widely shared.

What is Three.js Journey and how is it related?

Three.js Journey is the course Bruno Simon created after the portfolio went viral. He told Mux it spans roughly seventy hours of lessons and has enrolled tens of thousands of students, teaching the same WebGL and Three.js skills the portfolio shows off.