A Full Website Rebuild for an Award-Winning Wildlife Photographer

The brief

Ewan's existing site was a Squarespace template holding a genuine body of award-winning work — internationally recognised images, sitting inside a design that didn't reflect the quality of the photography or the story behind it. The instruction this time was more open-ended than the expedition page's brief, and in some ways harder: build a site worthy of the work itself, with one explicit constraint — don't reuse anything from the expedition site's design system. This needed to be its own thing, not a re-skin.

That meant starting from zero on direction, palette, and typography, then building an actual content architecture underneath it — his photography, his writing, his upcoming expeditions — that could keep growing long after launch without needing us back in the codebase for every update.

The challenge

A few things made this a genuinely different project from the expedition landing page, not just a bigger version of it:

• A photographer's site has to get out of the photography's way. We explored three creative directions before landing on one internally nicknamed "Long Exposure" — quiet, unhurried, closer to a nature-writing quarterly than a portfolio template. Near-black and warm paper tones, almost no saturated colour, so the photographs themselves supply it. The real discipline was restraint: every interactive idea we liked had to earn its place against the standing rule that the photography stays the hero.
• Two countries, one story. Ewan's work spans British wildlife and a newer, growing body of work in Costa Rica. The easy version of this site would have split those into two separate galleries. We were told explicitly not to — it's one continuous practice with a turn in it, not two portfolios — which shaped how the whole site's information architecture came together.
• Say what he does, early, plainly. Atmosphere is easy to overdo on a photography site. The brief was specific: state clearly that Ewan is a wildlife photographer, near the very top of the experience, before asking a visitor to sit with mood and pacing.
• Building for a CMS that doesn't exist yet. There's no content-management system behind this site on day one — but there will be eventually. Every piece of content (photography captions, Field Notes dispatches, expedition listings) had to sit behind a typed content layer we control, not hard-coded into page templates, so that later swap doesn't mean a rebuild.

What we built

Where design met real feedback

This build went through genuine client-directed revision, not just our own polish passes — worth naming because it's the difference between a site built at a client and one built with them:

• The homepage originally carried a scroll-scrubbed colour-grade narrating the UK-to-Costa-Rica shift. Ewan felt it didn't belong on the homepage specifically — it now lives on the About page instead, where the story is actually being told.
• The Selected Work concept was revised twice in a single day: from three galleries split by geography and species, down to two galleries split by curatorial intent instead — Awarded and Curated, with Curated deliberately mixing subjects and locations rather than reading as a themed collection.
• Typography changed mid-build at Ewan's direct request, from an initially-shipped serif to Bodoni Moda — we kept the original version committed separately so nothing was lost in the switch.

Problem-solving along the way

A few real issues worth naming, because they're the kind that stay invisible right up until they aren't:

• A font-loading bug that produced zero console errors: headings were silently rendering in the browser's fallback serif instead of the real typeface, because the custom properties supplying the font were declared on the wrong element for how they were being referenced elsewhere. Caught by checking computed styles directly, not by how the page looked at a glance.
• A scroll-linked colour transition that computed perfectly under manual testing but never fired on a visitor's actual scrolling — the animation and its scroll trigger had been created as two separate objects instead of one paired call, a wiring mistake that doesn't announce itself because everything else about the effect looks like it's working.
• A vertical "current section" label that occasionally froze on the wrong section name. Traced to how often the browser was allowed to recalculate it, not to the detection logic itself — an easy one to misdiagnose in the wrong direction first.

Where it stands

The site is live at ewancphotography.com, replacing the previous template site entirely. It launches with a real, previously-untapped photography library, real Field Notes entries in Ewan's own voice, and a structure built to keep growing as his expeditions and writing do. As with the expedition page, we'll add real results here once there's been time to gather them, rather than before we have them.

Designed for

An award-winning wildlife photographer replacing a template site with a real brand home

The goal

A site that reads as the actual body of work, with a foundation his expeditions and writing can keep growing into

What it demonstrates

Original design systems, scroll-driven interaction design, content architecture built to last