From Railroads to AI: engineering Sphere’s history by Roman AvshalumovFrom Railroads to AI: engineering Sphere’s history by Roman Avshalumov
Built with Webflow

From Railroads to AI: engineering Sphere’s history

Roman Avshalumov

Roman Avshalumov

Verified

From Sailing Routes to AI: Engineering Sphere’s Interactive History

The Vision

Sphere is an enterprise tackling a monumental challenge: automating tax compliance for the $200T+ in goods and services crossing borders every year.

The Creative Timeline: A History of Trade

The conceptual centerpiece of the page is an interactive, horizontal timeline.The journey walks users from early sailing routes and 1830s railroads, advancing through containerization and SWIFT, and finally arriving at Sphere as the ultimate compliance layer.

Visualizing Sphere's system with animations

Explaining a complex system dealing with the tax codes of 190+ countries isn't easy. To visualize Sphere's proprietary TRAM system, the design featured beautiful, intricate node networks and visual taxonomies of AI sorting SaaS, digital goods, and physical products.
The trap here is performance. Layering rich animations can easily and kill load times. By tying the playback precisely to the user's scroll position in Webflow, the animations only trigger when needed. That way it delivers the high-end visual impact Carrara designed, while keeping the site running at enterprise speed.
Sphere manages their hiring through Ashby, so a CMS wouldn't do, we had to use the Ashby integration. 
The problem? Ashby integration for Webflow does not exist.
A simple embed wouldn’t work either, because we needed full control over the design, filtering, and layout.
So I created the structure directly inside Webflow and connected it to live Ashby job data with custom code magic — and a bit of help from my good friend Gemini. I have a feeling that might be our common friend too, dear reader. That way, the careers section could stay fully on-brand while still updating dynamically.

The Takeway

Sphere is built on the idea of turning a tangled system into a seamless solution. Fittingly, that’s exactly what this project required: taking custom APIs, scroll-jacking, intricate Lottie animations, and transforming them into a fast, effortless digital experience
Like this project

What the client had to say

Roman was fantastic. He worked through a complex build like a boss, and push hard to meet deadlines. We'll work with him again - in fact, we're kicking off a new project right now!

Gonz Sanchez, Carrara

Feb 23, 2026, Client

Posted May 30, 2026

Developed a highly interactive design created by Carrara for Sphere using Webflow. The conceptual centerpiece of the page is an interactive, horizontal timeline

Likes

1

Views

0

Timeline

Feb 17, 2026 - Feb 23, 2026

Clients

Carrara