Anatomy of an issue.

The brief: a personal site for Kemi Osinibi that uses her actual photograph. The concept: don't put a photo on a website — put the person on a magazine. The whole page is art-directed as "The Clarity Issue": cover, feature spread, profile story, contents page, back cover.

The cover trick

The masthead OSINIBI is set in Bodoni Moda at up to 300px and layered behind the portrait — the classic fashion-cover move where the subject's head overlaps the title. The portrait is the real photograph with its background removed by Higgsfield's background remover, dropped over the page as a clean PNG cutout with a 60px soft shadow. Masthead, portrait and coverlines sit at three different parallax depths and drift at different rates with the cursor, so the cover feels like a paper collage with air between the layers.

The AI photography studio

Three generated assets share the page with the real photo, all made with Higgsfield (nano-banana-pro, ~2 credits each):

• The feature spread — an empty travertine-and-terracotta studio set with one band of golden light, generated at 2K in 16:9 and Ken-Burns-panned by CSS. Its palette was sampled to tint the whole site.
• "Dusk, kept" — a double-exposure artwork generated from her actual photograph as reference, preserving her profile while filling it with a golden dusk sky. It hangs on the back cover in a cream frame.
• The living-portrait video (used on the sister gallery site) — the same photo animated by Kling 3.0 into a five-second breathing cinemagraph.

Everything was preflighted with get_cost — the entire art program for two sites cost under 20 credits.

Magazine grammar

• Bodoni Moda (a variable didone with an optical-size axis) does mastheads, pull quotes and italic coverlines; Karla does captions in tracked-out caps.
• Coverlines, an issue tag, a CSS-gradient barcode priced ₦0.00 — FREE FOREVER, folios ("Feature — 01"), a drop cap, two-column body text, dotted-leader contents rows.
• Palette lifted from the photograph itself: sand, cream, ink brown, terracotta, old gold.

Ship it

Static files (one HTML page + five optimized assets), deployed to Netlify via the Netlify MCP connector. Three review passes caught a lost back-cover artwork (it drowned as a full-bleed background and was re-hung as a framed print — and its file path was wrong), plus the usual mobile fit checks.

Do it yourself

The workflow: real photo in, background removed, then use the same photo as the generative reference so every synthetic asset stays in the subject's world — same skin, same braids, same pearls, same light. AI imagery stops looking pasted-on when the person is the seed of all of it.