Qualis Eram Design: a portfolio in English, Hebrew, and Latin

The client runs a one-person fine-furniture workshop — and, in his other life, is a professor of medieval history. What he had was a camera roll: 76 workshop photos of bespoke tables, cabinets, and built-ins, accumulated across nearly a decade. What he wanted was a portfolio worthy of the work, quietly open to commissions. The brand he brought — Qualis Eram Design, motto Ars Longa, Vita Brevis — asked for something no template offers: a site that reads in English, Hebrew, and Latin.

The build shipped in two commits on a single day: the initial portfolio, then a full rebrand pass that folded in his brand kit, watermarked the photography, and added the SEO layer. A one-line follow-up later put the last unused easing curve to work on the lightbox carousel.

Languages

3

Works

18

Watermarked photos

76

Years covered

2017–26

From camera roll to catalog

The first job wasn't code — it was curation. The 76 photos clustered into 18 distinct pieces spanning 2017 to 2026, each of which became a catalog entry with a name, materials, and a description in all three languages — 162 localized content strings — plus technique tags, all in one typed JSON file. No CMS — the whole catalog is a single file the client can edit, and every push deploys.

Each piece is also marked studio or commissioned— vocabulary chosen to make the commission pipeline visible without a single “hire me” banner. The Latin renders it ex officina and ad mandatum.

Three languages, one of them dead

Hebrew means real right-to-left, and RTL correctness lives at three layers of the lightbox: arrow keys swap meaning, swipe gestures flip interpretation, and the carousel's translate direction inverts its sign. Chevrons mirror, layout uses logical properties, and the display face swaps to a proper Hebrew serif. A pre-hydration bootstrap script sets lang and dir before React wakes up, so a returning Hebrew visitor never sees a left-to-right flash.

The Latin is not decoration — every UI string is genuinely translated. The lightbox close button is labelled Claude — the true Latin imperative of claudere, “close!” — so screen readers in Latin mode get the pun. We did not plan it. We did keep it.

The details are the design

• ▸Named custom easing curves, and every transition declares explicit properties — no transition: all anywhere.
• ▸Hover lifts are gated behind hover-capable, fine-pointer media queries so touch devices never get sticky hover states; reduced-motion collapses all animation and force-reveals the gallery.
• ▸The paper-grain background is a zero-request inline SVG noise filter over warm gradients — the page reads as paper, not screen.
• ▸The brand seal is baked into all 76 photos' pixels (verified in git history as in-place blob replacements), so a right-click-save still carries attribution.

Shipped like a product

Under the warm surface it's a properly engineered site: JSON-LD structured data (a LocalBusiness with the maker as founder, plus an ItemList of all 18 works), hreflang declarations for the three languages, generated sitemap and robots, an OG image and a favicon set from the brand files, and responsive AVIF/WebP images with per-context size hints. The working prototype runs at reno-sepia.vercel.app and auto-deploys from the public repo on every push.

Ars longa, vita brevis held for the build, too: the craft is in the details, and the details are what took the time.

What we'd tell a client

• ▸Curation is engineering: clustering a decade of photos into a coherent catalog was the highest-leverage hour of the project.
• ▸Localization is a design decision, not a translation job — RTL changes how motion, gestures, and layout must think.
• ▸Watermark in the pixels, not the CSS, if attribution should survive a save-as.
• ▸A JSON file plus auto-deploy beats a CMS for a catalog that changes a few times a year.