Charles
Client work

Lens & Lu

A single-page site for a family and couples photographer, built around the last forty minutes of daylight.

Status
Liveclient preview
When
Jul to Aug 2026
Category
Client work
Links
lensandlu.warpyard.com

Dana shoots families and couples on the Gulf coast in the soft hour before dark. The site does one thing with motion: as you scroll into the portfolio, the ground darkens from cream to umber and the photographs light up against it. Everything else breathes slowly.

The client rejected orange, so the palette became five moody tones pulled from her own work.

The hero. Golden-hour photograph, the serif doing the talking.
The hero. Golden-hour photograph, the serif doing the talking.
The about section on the cream ground.
The about section on the cream ground.
The booking form on the umber ground.
The booking form on the umber ground.
The portfolio grid as the ground scrubs from cream to umber and the photographs light up.
The portfolio grid as the ground scrubs from cream to umber and the photographs light up.

Stack

  • Single-file HTML with inline styles
  • A small support runtime and an image-slot web component
  • Instrument Serif and Hanken Grotesk
  • Warpyard, push-to-deploy, build stages only servable files

Decisions

  1. A closed motion set of three verbs, drift, bloom, and grain. Nothing else ships, and the one fast beat on the page is always something the visitor caused.
  2. A hard pivot off the first terracotta palette when the client said no to orange. The new five-tone palette comes from her photographs, not from the studio's house style.
  3. Archetype set before a pixel moved, Free Spirit, Lover, Creator. Every section had to feel like one of those three.

Lesson

  1. A client site owns its own identity. The palette comes from the client's work, never from the studio's brand, and that rule is written into the project.