Heba Nasef
A portfolio site for Heba Nasef Sultan, a sculptor from Alexandria. The opening is a 3D story where one lump of clay turns into her sculptures as you scroll. Below it, she manages her own projects, photos and texts from a bilingual dashboard I built for her, with no database and no running costs.
Heba is a sculptor who had just graduated. She wanted a site that shows how her work is made, not only how it ends up. She also needed to change it herself, in Arabic and English, without paying for hosting or a database.
As you scroll, one lump of clay becomes each sculpture in turn, with a custom shader for the clay, the plaster and the patina. The process is the point of her work, so the site shows it.
The cost: The 3D models are heavy, so each one only downloads when the visitor gets close to it.
Every save in her dashboard is a commit on GitHub, and Vercel publishes it. It costs nothing to run, and every change can be undone.
The cost: A change takes about a minute to go live, and she needs a GitHub account to sign in.
Every field explains in Arabic and English what it changes on the site. There is a live preview beside the form, a confirmation before anything is removed, and the developer-only controls are hidden.
The cost: I wrote more help text than code for some screens.
She only had photos of her sculptures, so I generated 3D models from them and projected her photos back onto them, so the colours stay true to the real pieces.
The cost: The sides the photos never showed had to be filled in, and she had to approve them.
Live in English and Arabic. Heba adds and edits her projects herself, and the site resizes every photo she uploads.
