Client
Duration
#
Web Design
A Portfolio That Works as Hard as the Craft
Casa Studio makes ceramics by hand. Nothing about their website was going to be templated. We built a site around the work itself: a gallery that breathes, a brand voice pulled from the studio's own language, and a platform the founder could run without needing us for every update.
About the project
Casa Studio had the work. They needed a home for it that felt just as considered.
A small, Canada-based ceramics studio came to us with a growing body of work and no site to hold it. The brief was simple on paper, 'a portfolio', but the real task was translating a tactile, handmade practice into something that felt just as warm and unpolished-on-purpose online. It also had to be a site the founder could keep updating herself, long after we handed it off.
Challenges
A three-week build, on a platform built for simplicity rather than flexibility.
The timeline was tight and non-negotiable. The site needed to launch ahead of an upcoming studio workshop. We were also building on Format, chosen deliberately for how easy it makes self-editing, but a platform with real limits on layout and interaction. The job was to design something that felt custom inside a system that isn't built for custom, without the constraints ever showing.
Solution
An information architecture built around the work, and a visual language pulled straight from the studio itself.
We rebuilt the site's structure around how Casa Studio actually creates — a gallery broad enough to hold everything ceramic they put into the world, not just in-house pieces, with the footer doing quiet work as a secondary path so nothing got lost. Before any visual direction was chosen, we ran a short brand discovery exercise with the founder, distilling the studio's identity into a handful of words — raw, warm, handmade, homely — and let those words drive every design decision that followed: an earthy, dusky palette, generous white space, and a layout that lets the ceramics' own texture carry the page. The result is a site that reads as considered rather than templated, and one the studio can grow into — supporting e-commerce and event listings as the business scales.
DISCOVER MORE
