Web design
No-code development
Multilingual
About
The Society for the Advancement of Kaaps is a cultural organization dedicated to preserving Kaaps—a dialect spoken in the Western Cape that has historically been marginalized. They are the archivists of the language's history and future.
Most websites rely on auto-translate tools, but Google Translate makes a mess of Kaaps. It misses the nuance. The Society needed a solution that treated both languages with equal weight. I devised a "Dual-Architecture" strategy. We effectively built two mirrored versions of the site—one in English, one in Kaaps—connected by a custom toggle. This gave us total control over every word, ensuring the Kaaps version wasn't just a broken translation, but a standalone experience.
Visual Design
he design needed to legitimize Kaaps as an academic language without losing its soul. I moved away from "street" stereotypes and instead aimed for a look that felt institutional yet accessible. Since language is the hero, I prioritized typography, using a clean, high-impact serif and sans-serif pairing to ensure the unique phonetic spellings of Kaaps are treated with the same visual weight as standard English. I utilized a minimal, high-contrast palette of black, white, and subtle accents to strip away distraction, allowing the community stories to take center stage. The layout itself is open and breathable, using significant white space to signal that this is a serious place of research and preservation.
I utilized a static-site approach to manage the content. By avoiding heavy database queries for translation, the site remains incredibly lightweight. The custom toggle switch I engineered allows users to swap languages instantly, preserving their position on the page while completely swapping the text content.
I hose Framer for its absolute visual precision. Because we were building a mirrored site structure rather than using a database translator, we needed a tool that allowed us to manage the layout visually. Framer enabled me to duplicate the core English pages and manually typeset the Kaaps content side-by-side, ensuring perfect line breaks and flow for the dialect. It gave us the speed of a visual builder with the design freedom of a custom environment, allowing us to ship a complex, dual-language architecture without the bloat of traditional development.
