Parker
The artisan behind the lacquer
привет! (Privet! - Hello!) I'm a Russian-Australian Designer, Developer & Content Creator based around Sydney, Australia. I treat interfaces the way Khokhloma masters treat wood: start with a dark, quiet ground, then apply ornament only where it earns its place. Most of my work lives at the front-end but also the design decisions underneath: type scales, spacing systems, interaction states. What I find most interesting is the distance between a design file and a finished interface, and how much craft it takes to close it faithfully.
I didn't start here. My first degree was a Master's in International Economics back in Russia — reading systems, not building them. As a lover of human languages, I was also enrolled in minor Professional Translation & Interpretation Degree with focus on Business English, French & Spanish.
After I arrived in Australia I taught myself to code since I felt like my heart was not quite in Global Finances & Commerce. I further undertook a bootcamp-style course in Web Development Immersive, whilst also pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in Digital Experience & Interaction Design.
Since 2018 I've worked front-of-house and back across agency and client sites in parking, mining, hospitality, retail industries, to list a few. Apart from 9-5 routine, I've picked up an Azure administrator certification along the way, whilst remaining active in tech community by mentoring & volunteering at coding-related events (Women Who Code, Code Like A Girl) - in-person at first, then remotely after Covid hit in 2020.
To fulfill my long-term dream of having my own creative establishment, I run an independent production label where I build everything myself end-to-end: a podcast platform on Next.js 15, a browser game in React, and a movie blog — my own three-panel folk triptych of code, film criticism and mischief.
The artwork on this page is based on IRL spoon brought from Russia. I created it myself in AI - Adobe Illustrator, not ChatGPT: back then things were done by hand, hehe — as part of my degree assignments. But of course, we need to move on with the times - Claude Code has assisted with manual parts of coding the components & logic for this portfolio (& most of my recent projects, too!).
Painted, fired, shipped
Podcast platform
Full production site for an independent film-criticism podcast: git-backed CMS, custom RSS feed endpoint, zero-egress audio delivery, and a bespoke design system with strict token rules.
Publication
A film review publication built and operated end-to-end: custom domain and DNS, static delivery, and long-form criticism with proper Chicago-style citations.
Browser game
A darkly comic choose-your-fate horror game with a large library of authored scenarios driven from a single JSON data file, styled after Polish film posters.
Nothing filed under that craft yet.
Tools of the trade
Folk art, rendered in code
Khokhloma is a Russian folk painting tradition from the 17th century, originating in the forests of the Nizhny Novgorod region. Craftspeople decorated turned wooden objects — bowls, ladles, spoons — with a black lacquer ground, then applied ornament in red, gold, and green before firing in a kiln. Heat transformed silver tin powder into gold, producing the characteristic warm gleam of genuine Khokhloma lacquerware. The four colours — black, crimson, gold, green — have not changed in three centuries.
The style used here is Kudrina — a variation built on movement rather than pattern. Where standard Khokhloma fills the ground with isolated berries and leaves, Kudrina composes a kustik (little bush): a central rosette anchoring spiralling vine tendrils, with rowan clusters appearing where the stems branch. It is a style with a strict painting order — vine framework first, then leaves, then the rosette, then the berries last. The SVG animation in the hero follows that exact sequence.
The ornament on this site is drawn directly from a spoon I painted by hand. Every hex value in the colour system is sampled from that physical piece: the lacquer ground, the rosette crimson, the leaf gold, the vine green. The kustik SVG in the hero mirrors its composition — same stem geometry, same teardrop leaves, same twelve-berry clusters, same five rim dots. Building the site was, in a sense, painting the spoon again — this time in a text editor.
Available for front-end, design & content work. If you want a site with an actual point of view, drop me a line at hire-me@soniaparker.net
