A marketing platform that keeps up with the science it sells

Building inside Aqemia’s own Webflow account.

Webflow was the pragmatic platform choice as Aqemia had an existing site, so the team could edit copy in the CMS the moment the site went live rather than waiting on a handover.

The opening sequence ran past Webflow’s asset ceiling, which ruled out a conventional preloader. Rather than cut the moment, we compressed the asset and set it to a session-based trigger: the intro plays once per visit, greeting new arrivals without slowing returning ones. It was a small piece of restraint that respected repeat visitors, the audience Aqemia most wanted to keep engaged. The result was a credible presence in front of investors.

Holding a single coherent visual argument through multiple design rounds, we produced a site that read as minimal & scientifically authoritative at once.

The hard part was never the aesthetic in isolation. It was reconciling two qualities that usually pull apart: a site that looked effortlessly minimal and read as scientifically serious. The guiding principle was clean minimalism with a touch of elegance, fewer visuals, less rigidity, and subtle animation for sophistication.

Choosing a headless Next.js & Storyblok stack over a proven Webflow setup.

When the ambition grew, so did the demands on the platform. The new design called for scroll-driven molecule physics, theme transitions between sections, and rendered scientific formulae, none of which the existing platform could carry gracefully. The obvious path was to stay put: Webflow was proven, fast to edit, already part of Aqemia’s workflow. A headless rebuild promised the capability but required substantially more work to build.

Instead of trading editability for capability, we moved to a Next.js front end with Storyblok as the headless CMS, a combination that let Aqemia keep publishing content independently while gaining the animation and structured-content power Webflow couldn’t offer, which means the team never needs a developer to ship a change.

To let any two sections fade between light and dark themes, every content block had to sit inside a theme-aware wrapper in Storyblok: a front-end animation decision that reshaped the content model itself. The resulting architecture, built around a modular component library, renders KaTeX formulae cleanly and floats animated WebP molecules that drift as you scroll, giving a physics-first research company a homepage that finally feels alive with the science it sells.

Aqemia now runs a site its own team can update without a developer, molecule animations, formula rendering & all.

Both phases answered the same commercial stakes named at the outset. The rapid launch gave recruitment and early funding conversations a credible home. The headless rebuild then carried the heavier load, scientific authority for investor scrutiny and a visual system precise enough to signal craft to the scientists Aqemia recruits.

Aqemia now possesses a marketing platform its own team can extend at will, from copy edits to structured scientific content, without waiting on release cycles. The Next.js and Storyblok stack closes the exact capability gap that once made staying on Webflow the only sensible option, so a company recruiting scientists and courting investors in equal measure can now tell that story with molecule physics, rendered formulae, and full editorial control in its own hands.