The homepage lost its stock photo and grew a mountain
The Mulhacén Labs hero is now a living contour map of a mountain instead of a photo of one.
Twelve days ago the Mulhacén Labs homepage got a new front door — it opens with your problem instead of my tech stack. The words changed. The background did not. It was still a stock photograph of a mountain, sitting behind two layers of gradient to stop it fighting the text. That has now been replaced.
The hero is now a mountain drawn as a topographic map: thin green contour lines on deep navy, the same two colours as the logo mark. It moves, very slowly. The camera takes several minutes to complete a single orbit, and every so often a faint band drifts across the landscape, lifting the terrain a little as it passes — a wave of signal crossing the ground. The mountain is Mulhacén, the highest peak in mainland Spain, which is both where the studio takes its name from and roughly where I actually sit and work. The sweeping band is there because a good part of what I build is audio and signal processing, and it seemed right for the background to say so quietly rather than for a headline to claim it.
The point was to make the background feel alive without making it a showpiece. The copy on that page is deliberately spare and free of hype; a background that demanded attention would have undercut it. So the terrain sits at just over half opacity behind a soft vignette, and the peak is deliberately pushed to the right so it never rises up behind the words.
Not everyone will see it, on purpose. If your system is set to reduce motion — because animation makes you unwell, or because you simply prefer things to sit still — the mountain is never drawn at all, and you get a deliberately designed flat gradient instead. The same applies on phones, where a 3D scene would cost battery for a background nobody asked for. And if your browser cannot do 3D graphics, or blocks it, the page notices and quietly shows the same flat version rather than a blank rectangle. That flat state was designed as a proper alternative rather than treated as a failure, because a good share of visitors will only ever see that one. The animation also stops entirely the moment you scroll past the hero or switch to another tab — there is no reason for your laptop fan to spin up over a decoration you are no longer looking at.
One older promise finally got kept along the way. My own design notes have said since April that this site should use no stock photography, and that where an image is needed the fallback should be abstract geometry or topographic map lines referencing Mulhacén. The homepage hero was the last page on the site still contradicting that. Now it is the page that states it most literally.