Bruno Simon: The Portfolio You Drive Around In

Bruno Simon’s website is a portfolio you drive through. Instead of a resume and a grid of thumbnails, you get a little car, a stylized 3D landscape, and permission to bump into everything. His projects and awards are laid out across the ground as places to visit. It is free, it runs in your browser, and it is probably the most imitated personal site on the internet.

What is Bruno Simon’s site?

Bruno Simon is a French creative developer who specializes in 3D on the web. Rather than telling you that, his site simply hands you the keys.

The page loads into a soft-lit, low-poly world. You are a small toy car. There is no menu, no hero headline, no scroll. You press a key, the car moves, and the entire concept clicks about a second later: this is the portfolio, and driving is how you read it.

His work is placed around the world as areas you steer toward. Awards sit somewhere. Information about him sits somewhere else. Getting to any of it means actually going there. The site converts the passive act of scrolling into the active one of exploring, and in doing so it makes a claim about his abilities that no bullet point could.

There is also a delightfully childish layer on top. Objects have physics. You can shove things. You can knock stacks over. You can drive somewhere pointless just to see whether the car handles it. None of that is on the critical path to learning about his career, and all of it is why people send the link to their friends.

That is the trick worth stealing. The site is memorable not because it is technically impressive, plenty of sites are technically impressive, but because it is fun to be inside.

What can you do on it?

• Drive. Arrow keys or WASD on desktop, on-screen controls on touch devices. The car is deliberately a bit skittish and that is part of the charm.
• Visit the project areas. Steer toward the laid-out sections to see the work he has shipped and the awards he has picked up.
• Crash into things. Physics objects are scattered around specifically so you can. Go knock something over.
• Get somewhere you were not supposed to. Every visitor eventually tries to drive somewhere silly. This is encouraged behavior.
• Reset when you flip. You will end up on your roof. There is a way back. Do not panic.
• Follow the trail to his teaching. Simon also teaches 3D web development, and the site points the way if you want to build something like this yourself.

Tips to get the most out of it

Give it a moment to load properly. It is a real 3D scene, not a webpage with a video on it. Let the assets arrive before you start judging the frame rate.

Use a desktop with a keyboard. Touch controls work, but the driving feel, which is 80% of the experience, is much better with real keys under your fingers.

Explore before you read. The instinct is to beeline for the project list. Resist it for two minutes. Drive the perimeter first, find the odd corners, then go do the sensible thing.

Watch what the design is doing, not just what it looks like. Notice how information appears as you approach it, how the camera follows, how nothing ever demands a click. That restraint is the actual craft.

Treat it as a brief, not a template. Thousands of developers have cloned “3D portfolio with a vehicle” and most of them are worse than a plain HTML page. The lesson here is not “add a car.” It is “make the interaction demonstrate the skill you are selling.”

Close the tab, then try to describe it. You will remember it in detail days later. That is the metric his site is optimizing for, and it works.

If you like Bruno Simon, also try…

• WebGL Fluid Simulation: smear glowing liquid around your browser with your cursor, and see what else WebGL can pull off.
• Neal.fun: a collection of interactive pages built with the same instinct that a website can be a place rather than a document.
• Sandspiel: a falling-sand playground where physics is the entire interface.
• Cameron’s World: the opposite aesthetic, the same soul: a lovingly chaotic collage of the old handmade web.

Browse more in our Design & Creativity collection, then go take the car for a spin at Bruno Simon. Mind the bricks.