CuHeWe Initiative

CuHeWe Initiative (Cultural Heritage and Wellness Initiative) is a Nigerian nonprofit founded by Yinka Davies. It runs multi-day immersive programs that tackle two problems at once: heritage erosion and artist burnout. The programs draw on Yoruba, Hausa, and Igbo tradition, referred to together as WAZOBIA.

I worked across the project as both designer and developer, which meant carrying decisions from Figma straight into a working build rather than handing them off. That covered the visual identity, a custom icon system, the main website, and an immersive scroll-driven variant. The identity runs on that same warm maroon and terracotta palette over cream, carried through cinematic 3D-illustrated golden-hour scenes rather than generic stock imagery.

A nonprofit preserving culture needs a site that feels like the culture it's protecting, not a template with African-sounding copy dropped in. CuHeWe's challenge was building a digital presence that matched the weight of its mission: heritage work and mental health support for artists, two subjects that flatten easily online.

There was also a technical constraint baked into the brief. CuHeWe's audience doesn't guarantee fast connections or high-end devices, so a fully real-time 3D site or heavy scroll-scrubbed video was off the table. The site had to feel cinematic without carrying the bandwidth cost of actually being cinematic.

Four pieces make up what shipped:

• The CuHeWe website — a seven-page site built around the CuHeWe programs, using the warm maroon and cream identity throughout.
• Two immersive scroll-driven pages — built in Three.js on top of the same site, for the sections that needed more presence than a static page could give.
• The dual-coded icon system — every social icon carries a second meaning: a craft or instrument reference sitting under a familiar UI shape.
• Wazobia Anonymous — the site for CuHeWe's three-day immersive experience — Roots, Create, Forward — built to reconnect creatives and cultural practitioners with Nigerian heritage through storytelling, workshops, and community. It's a standalone microsite, sharing the parent site's design system but living on its own.

Working solo across design and code meant no handoff gap. Decisions made in Figma didn't get reinterpreted by someone else, they just got built. That sped things up, but it also meant owning every technical tradeoff myself, like testing Depth Anything v2 against Immersity AI before picking one, or settling for Veo 3 video generation and closing the gap with a technical workaround built around a custom Claude motion skill.

The bigger lesson was restraint. It would have been easy to reach for full real-time 3D everywhere. But CuHeWe's actual audience doesn't all have the bandwidth for that, and the 2.5D parallax and selective-video hybrid was the right call for them, even though it's the less flashy option on paper.

This phase wrapped after six weeks, with a few final updates still landing. The cinematic homepage parallax build and the Wazobia Anonymous site are next, built on top of what shipped here.