Natural Intelligence: Website for a Video Project About Books and People
About the project
Natural Intelligence (Естественный Интеллект) is a media project about healthy personal growth. It talks with people who have something to say about the books that shaped them, about places, and about things people usually keep quiet about. Its motto is "Read, think, talk".
The website is a showcase for the video project. Videos are not uploaded to the server. Instead, the site shows previews, descriptions, timestamps and links to the platforms where each episode can be watched.
Design
- A "paper newsroom" concept: paper texture, episode cards like pasted clippings, handwritten accents and red margin notes
- Ink-style book illustrations and large grotesque typography
- The manifesto text highlights smoothly on scroll, with subtle card animations
Sections
- Books: the "Five Books of One Person" and "Amateur Readings" series, with a series filter
- Episode page: cover, guest, date, duration, description, timestamps for each book and watch links
- Planet: an interactive map of the world and of Russia's regions that marks the places covered in episodes
- Partners and Contacts
- Episodes on YouTube, RUTUBE, VK Video and Dzen, with recognizable platform icons
- Links to the platforms go through the site's own short links, which helps count clicks
SEO
- Meta tags, canonical URLs, Open Graph and automatically generated OG images
- sitemap.xml and robots.txt. Hidden sections are automatically removed from the sitemap and return a 404
- Fast loading: static page generation and cache refresh via a webhook
Administration
- Strapi 5: episodes, guests, series, partners, sections and site settings
- Any section can be hidden with one "Show on site" checkbox, which removes it from the menu and the sitemap
- Access permissions and the site update webhook are created automatically when the CMS starts
Tech stack
- Next.js 16 (App Router), React, TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS v4, shadcn/ui
- Strapi 5 (headless CMS), SQLite
- Natural Earth maps (world-atlas, Russian regions)
