The Problem

Dune Collective was a twelve-person architecture and spatial design studio with a portfolio that included three award-winning residential projects and two major commercial commissions. Their reputation in the industry was strong. Their website was a static PDF portfolio uploaded in 2021 that had never been updated and was inaccessible on mobile.

The gap was creating friction in two directions. New clients who discovered Dune through word of mouth would check the website and find something that did not match their expectations, creating doubt before the first meeting. Press and editorial opportunities were being missed because journalists and publications researching the studio had nothing to link to. The studio had been operating well enough without a strong web presence, but that margin was narrowing as the work they were pursuing became more competitive.

"We had been coasting on referrals and we knew it. We needed something that could hold its own before anyone met us."

Principal, Dune Collective

There was a specific creative challenge in the brief as well. Architectural photography is the medium through which design studios are typically evaluated, and Dune's photography archive was excellent but inconsistent in format, color treatment, and resolution. Building something coherent from that material required design judgment as much as development.

The Solution

We started by working through the full photography archive with the studio to identify a subset of images that could anchor a consistent visual language. Not the most spectacular images necessarily, but the ones that told a coherent story about the studio's sensibility: a particular relationship to material, light, and the inhabitation of space. That curation exercise also helped the studio articulate their own design philosophy more precisely than they had before, which fed directly into the written content.

The site was built around the photography rather than around a conventional portfolio structure. Long-scroll project pages that moved through a commission as a spatial narrative, with minimal text that worked as annotation rather than description. The identity was typographically restrained, taking cues from architectural drawing conventions: precise, hierarchical, and without decoration.

"It captures something about how we think about space. We have shown it to clients before meetings and they arrive differently."

Co-Founder, Dune Collective

The mobile experience was built from scratch rather than adapted from the desktop, recognizing that the way a phone renders architectural photography is fundamentally different from a large screen and requires different compositional decisions.

The Result

The studio received three unsolicited media inquiries in the first month following launch, two of which resulted in editorial features. A commission inquiry came through the website contact form from a client the studio would not otherwise have reached through their referral network. The principals reported that first meetings had changed in character: clients arrived having already formed a view of the studio's sensibility, which shortened the early part of the conversation considerably.

The curation work done for the website had a secondary benefit: Dune used the selected image archive and refined project descriptions as the foundation for a competition submission that earned them a place on a shortlist for a significant public commission.