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, shot on phones across 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 started from a single detailed prompt and shipped in two commits: the initial portfolio, then a full rebrand pass that folded in his brand kit, watermarked the photography, and took the site to its custom domain.

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, techniques, and a description in all three languages: 162 localized content strings 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 alternates for the three languages, generated sitemap and robots, an OG image and favicon set derived from the brand monogram, and responsive AVIF/WebP images with per-context size hints. Live on the custom domain, auto-deploying from the public repo.

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.