Benjamin Urbaez

A personal website for Benjamin Urbaez — a Dominican-American spiritual music artist from Queens, NYC who blends afrobeats, spoken word, and indigenous-influenced soundscapes with his ancestral heritage. The site needed to feel like ceremony, not marketing.

This was one of the more nuanced AI-assisted design challenges: creating a dark, warm, ceremonial aesthetic that honored the artist's cultural identity while maintaining the polish expected of a touring performer with global collaborations. AI tools helped iterate on the mood and tone rapidly, testing palette variations and typographic pairings that felt authentic rather than generic.

What Made This an Exploration

• Translating deeply personal cultural identity (Dominican-Taino heritage, ceremony-as-music) into web design through AI-assisted iteration
• Dark aesthetic design system — warm blacks, amber accents, burgundy touches — developed entirely through conversational prompting
• Performance-optimized parallax and scroll animations built with requestAnimationFrame and IntersectionObserver
• WebP-first image strategy for live performance photography — optimized delivery without sacrificing visual impact

Design Highlights

Deep warm black background with cream text and amber accent lines. Cinzel display font with expansive letter-spacing for an editorial, performative feel. Cormorant Garamond at light weight for body text. Five-page site with gallery, music, and tour history sections. Scroll-triggered fade animations with staggered delays. The entire site avoids white backgrounds, box-shadows, and decorative borders — a strictly minimalist approach that lets the live performance photography breathe.