Redesigning Nomad Studio

Nomad Studio is a brand identity studio whose client list includes Nike, Apple, and Spotify. The brief for their portfolio site was straightforward and terrifying: the website needs to match the craft of the work it showcases. When your clients judge every typographic detail, every transition, every whitespace decision -- the site itself becomes a piece of the portfolio.

The project went through two major iterations. The first was a ground-up rebuild focused on editorial layouts and full-bleed case studies. Every project page had bespoke layout options: grid configurations, text placement, image sequencing. The second iteration refined the system based on how the studio actually used it -- which layouts they gravitated toward, where they wanted more flexibility, where constraints actually helped them make better editorial choices. That feedback loop between building and observing real usage is where the best design decisions come from.

Typography drove most of the technical decisions. Variable font loading, precise optical sizing, careful attention to line lengths across breakpoints. The studio's designers notice when tracking is off by 10 units or when a heading breaks to a second line at the wrong word. I built responsive type scales that maintained their proportional relationships across viewports rather than just scaling linearly. Pull quotes, captions, body text, and display headings each had their own scale with breakpoint-specific adjustments. The goal was that the type always looked deliberately set, never just "responsive."

Sanity CMS gave the studio full editorial control over layouts without touching code. Each case study is composed from structured content blocks -- image grids, text columns, video embeds, pull quotes -- that the designers arrange themselves. The schema enforces enough structure to keep things consistent while leaving enough flexibility for the bespoke layouts that make each project page feel unique. The studio updates the site weekly with new work, and they've never needed a developer to make a content change. That's the real measure of a good CMS integration: the client forgets the developer exists.