Gabriele Faoro works in two worlds: as an industrial designer and as an artist. His site needed to give each of them its own space, while still feeling like one place.

The site is split into two sides. The industrial design side has a light background and showcases his products, with the 3D model videos and a detail page for each product. The artist side switches to a dark background and gathers his drawings, graphic works and calligraphy. A single button lets visitors move between the two, triggering a transition that turns the shift from one role to the other into part of the experience.

I developed the site on my own in 2021, building it with Gatsby on top of the studio’s design. The centerpiece of the industrial design side is a carousel of videos showing the 3D models: it plays through them automatically, so visitors see the work in motion as soon as they land, and arrows let them take control and move through the pieces at their own pace.

Showing the models as pre-rendered MP4 videos instead of rendering 3D in the browser was a deliberate choice. It keeps playback smooth on any device, from a powerful desktop to an older phone, and keeps the site simpler to build and maintain, since updating the work is as easy as swapping a video.