Kissa Hoshi — forty years of a coffee shop, in one scroll

Three thousand photographs, no dates on most of them, and an owner who remembered every single one. The project was as much oral history as it was design.

We built the sequencing tool before the website. The owner sorted photographs by what he remembered happening, not by date, and that ordering became the spine of the site.

Image weight was the whole engineering problem. Scans arrived at 60 megabytes each. The published page loads a 34 kilobyte AVIF and upgrades only what enters the viewport.