TOA — Salvatore Colantuono

Upholstery, carpentry and sculpture had to read as one maker, not three catalogues.

Salvatore grew up in his family’s upholstery workshop in Torre del Greco, moved into carpentry and, during a long convalescence, into clay and sculpture. His pieces are one-offs: lamps sculpted from layered wood, furniture from recovered timber, carved and painted skulls rooted in tribal signs. The brief was to show the work, not the website. Every photograph of a piece sits on black, so any interface colour competed with it. We explored five layout directions, then folded them into one dark system where the photographs do the talking.

His only brand asset was a brushed signature. It became the logo without losing the gesture.

We vectorised the hand-brushed TOA signature once and used it everywhere in a single inherited colour, so it can never be recoloured or distorted: navigation, favicon, footer, share card. On the biography it is signed from left to right. An early Didone pairing fought with the brush, so one grotesk, Instrument Sans, carries everything else on a tight scale with negative tracking. Seven colour tokens, one mode. The only accent is a sage taken from the oiled patina of the wood.

Four page types, and a biography that explains three trades without a single date.

The home opens with a statement, cascades through the categories and pins a horizontal strip of highlights. Works can be read as a typographic index with a preview that follows the cursor, or as a staggered grid; the site remembers the choice. Each piece has a data sheet and a gallery that respects the real ratio of every photo. The biography carries the story: three crafts, Tappezzeria, Falegnameria and Scultura, told beside a numeral that changes from 01 to 03 as you scroll.

Motion adds the feeling of material. It never stands between a visitor and a piece.

We mapped twelve motion moments before building any of them, each with a place and a reason: a curtain between pages, a strip that pins and travels sideways, a marquee that speeds up with the scroll, a surface that ripples like grain under oil. Each one was tried in a live motion lab first and kept only if the page felt more physical with it. Everything respects reduced motion: with it switched on, the resting state is fully visible and the hero video stays on its poster.

No page builder, no cookie banner, no default login, and pages that search engines and AI assistants can read.

We built a custom WordPress theme with no page builder. Salvatore and his manager add works, photos and categories themselves, and new categories appear everywhere on their own. Every piece is described in structured data, the robots file welcomes AI crawlers, and a generated llms.txt gives assistants a clean summary to quote. The contact form has no plugin and archives every request with its consent. Nothing loads from a third party, so visitors get no cookies and no banner. The login is hidden, the mail is authenticated so it lands, and an audit before handoff caught two real bugs before the client did.