Studio Abîme — Website & Portfolio

A website and portfolio for Studio Abîme, a communication lab whose motto is “Plongée sous le visible”, a dive beneath the visible. The site makes a strategic, investigative way of working tangible by presenting it as a material archive to explore, not as a list of services. It was designed and developed in close collaboration with Studio Abîme, who led the art direction.

The visual direction draws on print. Pages sit on an archive-paper background with fine grain and creased-paper textures. Deep “Abîme” ink is paired with soft accents of light and sky, and the type pairs GT Canon Mono’s typewriter character with the narrow serifs of GT Canon Narrow. Throughout the site, editorial pieces read like documents laid on a desk: sheets slightly overlapping, plates, margin notes and figure numbers.

Each section has its own gesture. A domino in the page corner and rank pips act as wayfinding. On the home page, the studio’s research areas grow as Petri-dish cultures and its method plays out on a Scrabble board. The client case studies, called “Expériences”, can be explored as a constellation where each star has its own page. The Bibliographie (the studio’s journal) is an annotated table of contents. Native scroll and native links stay at the core, and every effect is an enhancement layered on top.

Behind the scenes, the site runs almost entirely without JavaScript: static Astro rendering, with small Vue components only for the journal and the shop. The studio manages everything itself in Sanity, with live visual editing, separate page templates for each case study and a multilingual architecture ready to grow. A Shopify shop with gift cards is built into the same visual world.

Art direction by Studio Abîme; web design and development by Isaure Lohest. Every part was hand-crafted from design to code, with accessibility and performance treated as part of the work rather than a final check.