III · Diaspora education

Yoruba
Fluent

A Yorùbá learning platform for diaspora and heritage learners, built on a hand-extended custom typeface and a dependency-free static site, stitched into a no-code booking and membership system.

Language learningCustom typographyNo-code hybridStatic site
The problem

Diaspora and heritage learners who wanted to learn Yorùbá properly had nowhere to go that did not feel like an afterthought bolted onto a generic language app. Worse, no typeface online rendered Yorùbá's tonal diacritics correctly, so even the words on the page looked wrong.

What I built

A standalone landing page and blog as a dependency-free static HTML and CSS site, hosted on GitHub Pages and embedded via iframe into a Wix Studio site. Code where it matters (the design system, typography, content) and no-code where it does not (bookings, payments, membership, login), all handled natively by Wix.

I hand-extended an existing typeface with fonttools to add proper Yorùbá diacritics, Ẹ, Ọ, Ṣ and the combining tone marks, since nothing off-the-shelf supported them correctly.

What I learned

Sometimes the right architecture is a hybrid, not a purist one. Building custom code for the parts that define the product, design and typography and voice, then delegating commerce and auth to a no-code platform, saved months of engineering without compromising craft where craft actually mattered.

Next case study Vocab