Forge

Overview

Adobe.com’s Site Redesign leaned heavily on scroll-driven and hover animation to sell the new visual language — but every one of those effects started as a request that had to land in an engineer’s queue. I built Forge to close that gap: a set of panels launched from the AEM Sidekick that let the production and content team author that motion themselves — pick a section, tune it, ship it, without opening a ticket.

What I built

The animation panel — a Sidekick-launched panel (page-animator) that exposes scroll and hover animation settings, including live Lenis smooth-scroll tuning, directly on the page a producer is already looking at.

Panel coexistence — Forge’s animation panel shares screen space with an existing annotation/review panel launched from the same Sidekick entry point. I reworked how the two swap in and out to stop the control overlap that was causing confusion, then added drag-to-reposition and left/right anchoring so people could arrange their own workspace instead of fighting the layout.

Ongoing ownership — Forge has a dedicated cross-timezone standup and a production team that depends on it daily. That standing user base drives a continuous loop of real feedback: collapse-all, consistent iconography, section labels, a page-highlight sync toggle — the kind of polish that only happens when you’re accountable to the people actually driving the tool every day.

What I learned

Building for other engineers is one thing; building for a non-engineering production team is a different bar entirely. Nobody’s required to use an internal tool — usability is the adoption rate. The fastest feedback loop I’ve had on any project came from a recurring standup with the people actually driving the panel every day, and it changed how quickly I was willing to ship a rough version and refine it in the open.