The client & the brief
Adinkra Stool Studio is a fictional brand — this is a concept project. The imagined client: a small Kumasi workshop of three carvers who make Ashanti-inspired domestic stools to order, and want to sell beyond word-of-mouth without misrepresenting what they do. No real workshop, orders, prices or payment flows exist; the craft, the symbols and their meanings are real and are presented with respect.
The brief, as written for the concept: "Each stool is carved after it is ordered, so there is nothing to photograph. Let a buyer in Accra — or Amsterdam — choose the wood, the carving and the size, see exactly what they are commissioning, and trust the price."
The problem
Made-to-order craft has a chicken-and-egg problem online: the product photo is the sales engine of e-commerce, and a commissioned object has no photo until it exists. The common workarounds all fail this brief:
- Photograph past commissions — shows the buyer someone else's stool, in someone else's wood, and invites "I want exactly that one" disappointment;
- Flat swatch pickers ("wood: walnut ▾") — reduce a sculptural object to a form, and give no sense of scale or presence;
- Generic 3D viewers with uploaded scans — heavy, and a scan of one stool is still just one stool.
There is also a second problem, and it is the more important one: the stool form and the adinkra symbols carry real cultural weight. A configurator that treats them as "styles" in a dropdown would be extraction, not homage.
The direction chosen
A parametric stool, generated live. Instead of displaying a model of a stool, the site is the workshop's geometry: the crescent seat, turned column and plinth are constructed from parametric curves in Three.js at load time, the wood and carvings are painted procedurally, and every choice rebuilds the object in front of the buyer. The stool you configure is not a picture of a product — it is the product's specification, rendered.
Three principles held throughout:
- The object is the colour. The UI stays nearly invisible — studio grey, hairlines, one ember accent — so a stool in ebony and a stool in pale sese make two completely different pages.
- Meaning before menu. Every motif is named in Twi, translated, and explained — in the picker, on the card, and in a dedicated craft section — so choosing Sankofa is choosing a proverb, not a pattern.
- The configuration is a document. A live GH₵ price, live dimensions, a human-readable configuration code (
AS-CL-WAL-DWE), and a downloadable spec card make the buyer's choice into something they can hold, send and reference — the paper trail a real commission would need.
Directions rejected
- Editorial scroll-story with a configurator at the end. Beautiful, but it buries the site's one honest superpower behind four screens of prose. Rejected: the configurator opens the page; the story supports it below.
- Photo-real replication of documented stools. Technically possible with enough reference, culturally wrong: many documented Asante stools are ceremonial, some royal, and reproducing specific historic stools as shopping options would flatten sacred objects into SKUs. Rejected outright; the geometry is an original, clearly contemporary interpretation of the everyday domestic form.
- AR "view in your room". Tempting for the scale problem, but it demands device APIs, model export pipelines, and a payload far beyond the collection's budget — and it fails everyone on a laptop. The size presets with real centimetre dimensions carry most of the value at a fraction of the cost.
- A full cart-and-checkout pretence. A fictional brand taking fake payments erodes exactly the trust the design is meant to build. Rejected in favour of an honest "how ordering would work" section and a visible concept disclaimer.
Key decisions & trade-offs
Parametric geometry over a modelled GLB
A sculpted mesh would look richer per polygon, but it would be one fixed stool. Parametric construction means the Child, Classic and Grand sizes are genuinely different objects with correct proportions — the corner posts, for instance, are cut to meet the seat's underside curve at each size — and the entire "model library" costs a few hundred lines of code instead of megabytes of assets. The trade-off is real: organic carving detail (tool marks, asymmetry, the carver's hand) is out of reach. The design leans into that honestly — this is a specification preview, and the ordering section says the carved stool is the artwork.
Carving as a draped decal, not painted UVs
Painting the motif into the seat's wood texture would smear it across the extrusion's contour-based UVs. A small vertex grid draped over the seat's top curve places the symbol exactly, at any size, and lets the bump map shade its edges into a groove. Trade-off: the motif sits only on the seat top — which is where a carver would put it anyway.
Three finishes, three motifs, three sizes
A configurator's illusion of infinite choice is usually a tax on confidence. Every option here is curated and priced like a real workshop would: the base wood is free, finishes carry honest premiums, and the count stays small enough that each choice keeps its meaning. Twenty-seven total configurations — every one of them defensible.
GH₵, visibly
Pricing in Ghana cedis, formatted locally, is a small decision that anchors the fiction in its place. A "global craft brand" pricing in dollars would have been the default — and the wrong story.
Respectful adaptation
The cultural line was drawn early and checked at every step: adapt the everyday domestic stool form; never reference the Golden Stool or ceremonial/royal stools; use only widely shared adinkra symbols; present each with its Twi name and meaning rather than as decoration; and state plainly on the page that a real venture of this kind should be led with Ghanaian carvers as partners and credited makers. The craft section carries this note in full view, not in a footer.
Intended impact — as design goals
- A buyer should understand what they are commissioning — form, wood, carving, size, price — within thirty seconds, without reading a paragraph.
- The object should feel present: light falls on it, it turns under the hand, it casts a shadow. Presence is what replaces the product photo.
- Each symbol's meaning should travel with the purchase — on the picker, the craft section and the downloaded card — so the stool's story survives delivery.
- As a portfolio piece: demonstrate that a real-time 3D commerce experience can be built with no asset pipeline at all — geometry, textures, lighting and the sales document, all from code.
No client results are claimed — this is demonstrated capability, not a case history.