designing the Studio Atlas brand
A quiet identity and Sanity-backed site for an architecture studio — strict grid, warm neutrals, and a front end that doesn't compete with the buildings.
Architecture studios have a specific problem on the web: the work is already the hero. If the site performs, it looks insecure. If it's only a gallery, it looks unfinished.
Studio Atlas was about building a presence that felt as precise as the practice. Next.js for the front, Sanity for the content, Tailwind for a grid that doesn't collapse into "card soup." Warm neutrals, lots of air, image-forward pages, hover states that barely move.
Why Sanity
Architects will not open a pull request to swap a project photo. A CMS is the difference between a brochure and a site that lasts a year. Sanity's model is structured enough that "project" isn't a blob of HTML. Slugs, galleries, and metadata stay typed. The front end stays boring in a good way: query, render, don't invent layout per case.
What was hard
Restraint. Every extra animation is a bid for attention the photography already won. Page transitions had to be short. Type had to scale without turning the name into a poster. The identity system — type, space, rules for image crops — mattered more than a custom cursor.
The technical work is the usual Next.js + CMS glue: structured queries that don't overfetch, images that don't layout-shift, a project template that still looks considered when the studio adds a messy shoot.
What's next
A clearer index that filters by typology without looking like an e-commerce catalog. And real project photography in the CMS, not stand-ins.
Launch day is [DATE] until I have a ship record I can point at. I won't fake a calendar for a brand case.