Rafa & Nicky

The duo arrived with a strong point of view and almost no infrastructure around it. The site had to carry them from first commissions towards campaign work: editorial and considered, easy to grow, anchored by their hand-drawn signature — and built so that neither they nor a future collaborator would ever be locked into me. That last requirement shaped nearly every technical decision that followed.

Three tensions had to be resolved at once.

The photography needed room to breathe, yet a site that is only a grid of images is forgettable. A bespoke, motion-rich site is usually the least maintainable kind. And the budget was lean while the site had to look at home beside photographers two tiers ahead. Every decision on this page answers to one of those three rows.

The direction came from the photographs themselves and a reference pass through editorial fashion sites, galleries and museums. The throughline: typographic restraint plus one signature gesture — borrow the confidence of a gallery wall, then add a single human mark.

To keep every decision grounded in who the site is for, six audiences were mapped and ranked. The ranking is the point: the site is built for the realistic near-term win, not the dream client it cannot land yet. Each audience is distilled to the question it arrives with.

One insight from that work shaped the entire site. An early-career book cannot lean on big logos or stacks of tearsheets; the job is to make a lean résumé read as inevitable talent, and to lower the risk of being someone's first commission.

The signature became the brand's anchor — but not on the first pass. It moved through an elegant script, then bolder block explorations, before settling on the final hand-drawn mark: the one that points where the duo want to grow, and carries enough personality that the rest of the interface can stay neutral.

On the site, the landing page opens on that signature, large and centred. On the visitor's first interaction it shrinks into the corner and becomes the navigation logo — one continuous motion, about a second. An intro, not a gate: the mark holds just long enough to register, then hands off to the photography.

The work is not a paginated grid. It is one continuous collage — overlapping frames scanned across like a gallery wall, looping seamlessly in both directions and drifting gently when left alone. On a phone the same motion turns vertical: a true mirror of the desktop experience, not a watered-down version.

One craft detail carries the chrome. The mark, the navigation and every interface element are painted white and blended with the page, so a single element reads near-black on paper and flips to white the moment a photograph passes beneath it. No second colour, no manual theming.

Around the collage sits a small, consistent kit — an overlay menu that opens in place rather than navigating away, project pages with staggered editorial galleries and a full-screen lightbox, and an about page — all assembled from the same documented components.

The site went through two deliberately lean rounds of user testing — a small handful of participants, enough to catch where the experience and our assumptions diverged. Three decisions changed.

Two short sessions were the cheapest way to surface all three — and spared a far more expensive course-correction later.

With the direction settled, the system was formalised in Figma and in code together: a semantic palette on a warm paper ground; a type scale that steps through discrete sizes at each breakpoint rather than scaling fluidly; and accessibility built in, with every text-on-ground pairing tuned to WCAG AA. Three swatches were nudged darker and pushed back into Figma — the source of truth stays accessible too.

The handoff is not a static site someone must reverse-engineer. It is a codebase written so the clients can maintain and grow it themselves, with documentation in plain language that a person — or an AI assistant — can follow to add a project, a page, or a style.

Handoff is a feature.

The entire site is plain HTML, CSS and a little JavaScript — the files open directly in a browser. No package manager to keep current, no toolchain to break, no framework to age out. In five years it still opens. Design tokens act as the contract between Figma and the code, and the documentation was written alongside the build, not after it.

The duo get a portfolio that looks the part — image-first, editorial, memorable in exactly one place — and a site they own outright rather than a deliverable maintained through me. It stands today as a working prototype, built not as a clickable mockup but as the real, deployable thing, and launches in August 2026.