glaive
Designed and developed a website for glaive (glaivemusic.com) ahead of the release of his new album.
He wanted a website that felt timeless. A space that would grow and fit around the aesthetic of any current or future release. This site would reflect the current "era" like a moodboard with scattered images, writing, and music intermixed.
Based on some of the minimalist and brutalist sites glaive had sent over for inspiration, I decided to build everything around a responsive grid system that could house tons of dynamic content like tour dates, merch items, videos, images of any size and text. This created a cohesive look across all pages while allowing some grid-breaking items to pop.
Technical Details
Due to the incredibly large volume of hosted images coupled with high traffic, making the site high-speed and low-cost were the highest priority.
glaive's team also wanted a CMS to edit all content and add images whevever needed. At first I opted to built the backend in firebase, using a custom fork of FireCMS as the backend. This was low-cost for them and relatively fast, but it made deployment difficult as firebase doesn't allow you to run build scripts for deploying a static site to their hosting.
After testing other options, I reworked the backend with Sanity CMS, adding a custom build script to pull data, compile with Eleventy, and deploy the static site. This would allow glaive's team to make edits and deploy as-needed, while the static build and compressed images served through Sanity’s CDN kept the site fast and bandwidth-efficient.