Portfolio website for branding studio Clever Ghost
A portfolio site for branding studio Clever Ghost, built to stand beside the identities in it without competing with them. Fast under a lot of large imagery, and theirs to publish to without coming back to us.
Clever Ghost in numbers
The challenge: judged on your own site
A branding studio’s own website is the hardest one they will ever be judged on.
Clever Ghost needed theirs to prove the point their work makes for clients, which meant the design had to be confident enough to stand beside the identities in the portfolio without competing with them.
It also had to stay fast while carrying a lot of large imagery. A portfolio is mostly photography, and a gallery that hesitates undermines the argument the studio is making about craft.
A portfolio is never finished, either. New work lands constantly, and a studio that has to email its developer to publish a project will sooner or later stop publishing.
Our approach: frame the work
A studio’s own site is the one piece of work every prospective client will judge them on.
So the design gets out of the way of the work. A dark, quiet frame, generous space, and typography confident enough to hold its own without shouting over the identities it is presenting. The projects are the loud part.
Speed was a real constraint rather than a nice to have. Everything is converted and sized on upload and loaded on demand, so a site built almost entirely from large imagery still arrives quickly.
The bespoke CMS lets the studio publish a project, write for the journal and update their client list themselves. Anything a visitor likes can be shared straight to social or into a WhatsApp conversation, which is how this kind of work actually spreads.
What we built for Clever Ghost
A portfolio has one job, and everything that does not serve it was left out.
Project pages
Each piece of work gets space, scale and context: what the brief was, what the studio did, and what it looked like when it shipped.
Sharing built in
A project can be sent straight to social or into a WhatsApp conversation, which is how branding work actually travels between people.
The journal
Articles on design and identity, published by the studio, which is where most of the site’s search traffic arrives.
Client list
The studio’s own roster, kept current by them, doing the job a logo wall does in a meeting.
Image performance
Large imagery is converted and sized on upload and loaded on demand, so a gallery-heavy site stays quick on a phone.
Their own CMS
Projects, journal articles and the client list are all editable by the studio, so new work never waits on us to go live.
What Paul said
★★★★★
Working with the team at Element Seven they helped bring our studio site to life. They stepped us through what it takes to make our site efficient and functional with a clear process from start to finish. Our new site has seen increases in organic traffic and importantly as a business more enquiries.
We've not only been able to showcase our work via our new site but have been able to tap into new business by showing off the site itself as the result of creatively collaborating with Element Seven. We couldn't recommend them enough, as a studio we trust them not only with our own work but with our clients' work.
The Tech-Spec
Laravel and Vue, with a bespoke admin built for one job: getting new work published quickly. The studio manages projects, journal articles and their client list themselves, and imagery is converted and sized on upload so a portfolio full of large files still loads fast.
HTML5, SCSS, CSS3, vue.js
Laravel (MVC framework)
Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Mailchimp
Services on this project
Most of our clients use more than one.
Bespoke websites
Designed and built from scratch around your business rather than adapted from a template. Every page and every field is there because it earns its place.
→ 02Design services
Branding, artwork and the design work that sits around a site rather than inside it.
→More work
A few of the other projects we have built.
