Projects
KAV Studio — A portfolio-first site for a photography studio
KAV Studio is the photography studio I run with my wife, Adriana Vasquez, in Cuenca, Ecuador. We shoot portrait, beauty, fashion and lifestyle work, and I designed and built the studio's website — kavstudio.art — as the place that work lives online.
This one is different from most of what I build. There's no complex state, no API, no on-chain logic. The entire design brief was a single discipline: get out of the way of the photographs. On a photography site, every UI decision is in competition with the images, and the images have to win.
When your client is your own studio, there is nobody to hide a weak decision behind. The brief was short and unforgiving: the work has to lead, the interface has to disappear, and Adriana has to be able to publish a new shoot without calling me.
That third point quietly decided the whole architecture.
I build most things in Next.js and React. For this I deliberately didn't. A statically generated site I control would have meant that every new shoot — every wedding, every session, every portfolio refresh — routes through me and a deploy. That is exactly the wrong bottleneck for a working studio.
WordPress was the right tool because the real requirement wasn't a framework, it was content autonomy: Adriana adds and reorders galleries herself, from her phone, the day after a shoot, with no build step and no developer in the loop. Choosing the boring, self-serve option over the one I'd personally enjoy more was the single most important decision in the project.
The design language is deliberately near-silent. A black-and-white interface — thin type, a quiet KAV monogram, a single green accent for interaction — so that the only real colour on the page comes from the photography itself. Generous whitespace gives each image room to breathe, and the layout leans on a justified masonry grid that packs portraits, landscapes and squares into a clean mosaic without cropping them into uniformity.
The whole site is four honest pages — a portfolio-first home, categorised portfolio galleries, an about page for the two of us behind the studio, and contact — because a photography studio does not need more, and every extra page is one more thing competing with the work.
The hardest engineering problem on a site like this is the obvious one: it is almost entirely large photographs, and large photographs are slow. The build leans on lazy-loading the grid, serving right-sized responsive images, and a lightbox that loads full-resolution files only when someone actually opens one — so the first screen stays light even though the library behind it is heavy.
Restraint is harder than features. The temptation on a creative site is to reach for motion, overlays and clever transitions. Almost all of that fights the photographs. The hardest edits were deletions.
Designing for your own eye is its own trap. With a personal brand there's no external sign-off to force a decision, so it's easy to keep fiddling forever. Shipping meant deciding that done and serving the work beats perfect and unlaunched.
The best CMS is the one the owner actually uses. The measure of success isn't how the site looked on launch day — it's whether Adriana still updates it months later without me. WordPress made that true.
A living portfolio the studio runs itself: a quiet, monochrome frame that puts KAV Studio's photography first, loads fast despite being image-heavy, and — most importantly — gets updated with new work by the people who shot it, not the person who built it.