DOSE: Website for a strategist who starts with the problem

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Julie Matthews founded DOSE Creative Studio after creative director roles at agencies. She had a credentials deck and a Squarespace site. She needed a website that showed her past campaign work with the weight it deserved, read like a brand system, and that she could update without a designer.

We designed it in Figma, built it in Framer with a CMS, and handed it over. It is live at dosecreativestudio.com.

Most of the proof was film. Some campaigns were never shot as stills. The studio was new, so there were no safe images for the services section. Julie had rewritten the copy shorter and sharper, then locked it. The design had to fit the words.

She was, in her words, "100% new to Figma and Framer." After launch she had to be able to swap an image, change the featured project and add a case study without breaking anything.

The brief set four launch pages: Home, Work, About and Contact. Services folded into Home. CMS collections for the work. An enquiry form to her inbox. Two rounds of feedback per phase, and a handover with a walkthrough.

Each review had one job. When visual comments arrived during wireframes, the round stayed on structure: page order, content order, and the right level of detail. Visual ideas got noted for the design stage.

The site's design system doubles as DOSE's first brand guidelines, with the logo built as a swappable component so a future logo drops straight in. Three typefaces went to Julie side by side. She picked Instrument Sans. Two background versions settled the palette. She chose off-white: "it works better on the pages that are copy and heavy and don't have enough images."

Development started on the morning of October 9. The first version of Home, Work, About, Contact and a 404, on desktop, tablet and phone, took one day and went out that evening. A few more days of tweaks followed.

Films play in place on the page instead of jumping to Vimeo. Each Work entry follows Julie's own structure: The problem, What we did, What changed. The case studies moved into the Framer CMS so the content can change without touching layout.

On October 12 Julie got the editable Figma file, a recorded walkthrough of the CMS and domain, and the Framer project transferred to her own workspace. Written notes cover her four editing tasks step by step, and the few rules that keep the site from breaking.

The site is live on DOSE's own domain, dosecreativestudio.com, in Julie's Framer workspace. She can change the work herself through the CMS. About five weeks from acceptance to live.

Julie Matthews, Contra review