X New Worlds.
Portfolio site and private NDA viewing room for a London AI artist, with her Instagram feeding the CMS automatically.
- Client
- Suzannah James / X New Worlds
- Deliverable
- Portfolio site + private client area
- Year
- 2024
- Live site
- xnewworlds.xyz ↗
The brief
Suzannah James makes AI and interactive art as X New Worlds, with work shown at the Saatchi Gallery, in Times Square and at the Busan Museum of Art. She needed a site that put the work first and brought in commercial enquiries, plus a private area where clients could see work still under NDA.
The approach
Suzannah came with the design largely worked out, so our job was to build it faithfully and make it easy to run. We built it on Next.js and Payload CMS, with a Three.js displacement effect on the homepage and GSAP for motion. The NDA portfolio sits behind its own login, so she can share a password instead of a folder of files.
The result
Launched in 2024. New Instagram posts reach the portfolio without her opening the CMS, so the site keeps pace with the work.
Instagram to CMS, automatically
Zapier watches Instagram
Each new post is copied into Airtable as soon as it goes up.
Airtable holds the posts
Images and captions wait in Airtable, ready for the site to collect.
Middleware caches the calls
Airtable's free plan limits API usage, so we built a small service that caches its responses. The site asks the middleware instead of Airtable, so images aren't fetched fresh on every request.
Payload publishes
Posts arrive in Payload as portfolio entries and go live on the site.
- Next.js
- Payload CMS
- TypeScript
- Three.js
- GSAP
- Airtable
- Zapier