Ü is a 3D visualization studio working for developers and architects across Serbia and Europe. Their work lived in WhatsApp threads, so anyone who got their name had no way to see the level in one pass.
I designed them a portfolio site: three levels, four directions, twenty projects — and a structure the studio runs on its own.
Product Designer • 2026
Visit the site →
Someone recommends the studio to a developer. The developer asks to see work, and what arrives is a folder of files in a messenger — if it arrives at all. There was no single place to look at the level of the work, and no way to tell whether these people do the thing you actually need.
One pass, one direction, one project
A developer needs three things, and the site does exactly three.
Judge the studio in one pass, find the right direction, see one project in full. Exteriors, interiors, compositing and floorplans are four different crafts with four different buyers, so the direction filter is not decoration.
The Exterior direction — desktop and phone
Twenty projects, one layout
Twenty project pages were never going to be twenty designs.
The site is content-managed, so the project page is a single layout that any row flows into. A new project is a new row — cover, frames, 360 panoramas, a direction — and the page builds itself. Adding the twenty-first work needs no designer, which for a small studio is the difference between a site that stays current and one that quietly goes stale.
Covers keep their own proportions: a tower is tall, an aerial is wide, and cropping both to one ratio is the last thing a visualization studio should do to its own work. The grid ends ragged at the bottom and owns it — the opening three cards step down, so the uneven edge reads as a decision rather than a bug.
A project page — desktop and phone
A palette that stays out of the way
Almost every pixel here is someone else’s image at full width, so the interface had to disappear: off-white paper, near-black ink, no shadows, one accent.
I measured a studio site in the same genre rather than eyeballing it — paper, ink, caption grey, heading ratios. The one thing I did not take was its blue accent, which looked great on their site and fought every render on ours. Out of four candidates the client picked a vermilion that sits next to golden-hour light instead of arguing with it.
COLOUR
Paper
#FAFAFA · page and cards
Ink
#090909 · 19.1:1 on paper
Caption
#797979 · 4.2:1 on paper
Accent
#E4572E · 3.5:1 · one use per screen
Hairline
#090909 at 20% · the only line on the page
TYPE · DM SANS
Renders
display · 68/68 · 700 · −2.72
Exterior
h1 · 44/50 · 600 · −2.2
Interior Project 4
h2 · 32/40 · 600 · −0.8
Facades, massing and context
body · 16/24 · 400
City, Country · 2026
caption · 13/19 · 400
A hero that renders itself
The approved prototype bothered me: page after page of buildings, it could have been an architecture firm’s site. But the studio does not sell buildings, it sells images of them, and the process was nowhere to be seen. So the hero became one render shown as it gets made — eight stages from empty ground to the finished frame, one camera, no cuts. The stages only play inside the building’s own mask: the forest and the water are final from the first second, so your eye goes straight to where the change is, and the house dresses from the ground up the way it gets built.
The hero itself — one render, eight stages, one camera
01 Site
shore, forest, water
02 Wireframe
wireframes
03 Clay
volume hardens
04 Glazing
openings go in
05 Materials
wood, stone, glass
06 Light
shadows land
07 Grade
warm correction
08 Final
people, reflections
It brings work in
The studio stopped sending folders over messengers. In the first three months the site brought in eleven enquiries and four signed projects — developers who landed on a direction page, looked at one project in full, and wrote to the address in the footer.
Every new work since has been added by the studio itself: a cover, a few frames, a direction, and the page builds itself. Nobody has to call a designer to publish a project.
11
enquiries in three months
4
projects signed
0
designer hours to publish one