Stefan Botnari - Frontend Developer & Creative

Hi, I'm Stefan, a frontend developer and computer science student based in Belgium. BotnariCreative is where I put my work out into the world, finished projects, ongoing experiments, and the occasional thing that didn't go as planned. I've never been precious about sharing work before it's perfect. For me the process is as much a part of it as the result, and this place is a living record of both.

I've been building for the web seriously for a few years now. Freelance work, real clients, my own ventures. The stack is React, Next.js, TypeScript, but the part I keep coming back to is where code stops being purely functional and starts having a character to it. I got into frontend because I liked building things, and somewhere along the way I realised I cared just as much about how they feel as whether they work. Those two things aren't really in tension, they just both take time to get right.

More recently that's pulled me toward the visual and generative side of things. Grain, dithering, generative graphics, the territory where you're not sure if what you're doing is engineering or something else. I find that ambiguity more interesting than resolving it. I spent a long time figuring out what I actually like, doing mood boards, going through references, letting things develop slowly. The aesthetic direction on this site is the result of that.

When I'm not in front of a screen I'm usually in front of a different screen. Microcontrollers, custom hardware, 3D modelling. The tinkering never really stops, it just changes shape.

Anyways, enjoy.

Yours truly,