Michel Furniture is a family upholstery business with decades of work and no digital home. I owned the full project: the logo system, the brand language, and the website that's live today. This is the project that taught me that designer-builder is not two jobs glued together. The site moves the way I want it to move because I drew the marks, set the rhythm, and wrote the code.
Why one person, end to end
The logo and the website needed to share a heartbeat. A small studio could have split this in two and gotten two competent halves. I wanted the kerning of the logo, the easing of the scroll, and the temperature of the photography to all come from the same hand. That decision is what made the site feel like an upholstery shop and not a furniture brochure.
Logo as anchor
I built the wordmark first and then designed the site backward from it. Same letterforms, same restraint, same air. When you land on the site, the logo doesn't introduce the brand. It already is the brand. The site just gives it a room.
Early in the AI era
I built this at the very edge of the AI coding wave. A lot of the layout decisions were mine and a model arguing in a sidebar. Looking back, this is the first project where I felt the shift from 'designer who hands off' to 'designer who ships.' That's the shift the rest of the portfolio is built on.
