Dorothy Street
Female run production company telling distinctive, compelling and cinematic stories.
A bold, story-led site for a female-run production company, built so the work plays without anything getting in its way.
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Midnight #191970
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Cloud #fcfdfc
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Mint #deecde
For this project, I collaborated with Dorothy Street, a female-led production company, to design and build a bold, performance-led website that showcases their cinematic storytelling style. Prioritising speed, clarity, and narrative flow, I crafted a distinctive design system and implemented it using a Jamstack approach with 11ty and Netlify. The result is a fast, story-driven site where case studies are presented with visual flair and purpose, aligning closely with the brand’s creative ethos.
The Challenge
Dorothy Street tell distinctive, cinematic stories for a living. That sets a high bar, because a production company's website is judged by the same people who judge their films.
The difficulty with any showreel-led site is that the two things you want most tend to work against each other. Rich video and full-bleed imagery are what sell the work, and they are also what makes a site slow. A beautiful site that takes six seconds to show you anything has already lost the person it was trying to impress.
On top of that, the case studies needed to feel like stories rather than a grid of thumbnails, which is a harder structural problem than it sounds.
The Approach
I built a distinctive design system first, so every case study had a consistent narrative shape to sit inside. That is what lets the work feel considered rather than assembled, and it means new projects slot in without a redesign each time.
Performance was treated as a design constraint from the start rather than something to fix at the end. The site is built with 11ty and deployed on Netlify, which keeps it static and fast by default, so the visual ambition never comes at the cost of speed.
Narrative flow drove the layout. Pages are paced to move you through a story, with room for images to land rather than fighting for attention.
The Result
A fast, story-driven site where the case studies are presented with real visual flair and a clear sense of purpose.
It looks like the work it represents, which for a production company is most of the job. Just as importantly, it loads quickly enough that nobody leaves before the first frame appears.
