E-shop / Film camerasSelf-initiated study
Obscura
Self-initiated study, no client: Obscura is a fictional 1996 shop in New York. The site itself is real and live at obscura-nine-alpha.vercel.app.
The problem
Studio portfolio pieces tend to look alike: clean lines, white backgrounds, a product floating in empty space. We wanted to show the opposite end of the range, a site with character and memory: a 1996 New York camera shop, seen through a browser of its time.
The bet was that it would not stay a stage set. Behind the retro shell a real e-shop had to work: catalogue filters, a cart, a checkout, with no framework and no build step.
The approach
Three hand-written files: HTML, CSS and JavaScript, typeset in Press Start 2P, VT323 and Space Mono. The centrepiece is the darkroom: as you scroll, a photograph develops onto paper the way a real print does.
The shop works: filters by format and decade, a cart that respects stock levels, a checkout that prints a dot-matrix receipt and a 35mm contact sheet you can download as an image. The cameras are fictional merchandise and their photographs are AI-generated: we say so, the same way we say there is no client.
Facts
- Status
- Live: obscura-nine-alpha.vercel.app
- Build
- Static HTML/CSS/JS, 2,888 lines
- Typography
- Press Start 2P + VT323 + Space Mono
- Cart & checkout
- Working, stock-aware
- Security audit
- 0 critical or high findings
- Film stocks
- 5
The outcome
Before going live it passed successive internal audits: accessibility with a motion-pause control and full prefers-reduced-motion support, a security review with zero critical findings plus a Content Security Policy, and a performance pass that moved the heavy image effects onto a fixed overlay so scrolling stays smooth.
It is live at obscura-nine-alpha.vercel.app: an e-shop with personality, where the nostalgia never costs usability or safety.