Studio Brooke Canal: designing a site that gets out of the way

Studio Brooke Canal is a creative studio in a genuinely good-looking canal-side space, and the first draft of their site made the classic mistake: it tried too hard to compete with the space instead of showing it off.

We stripped most of it back. Fewer sections, bigger photography, almost no decorative UI — buttons that look like buttons and nothing else, no gradients, no icon soup. The theory: when the actual content (the studio, the work made in it) is strong, the best thing the interface can do is get out of the way.

The one place I did add friction on purpose was image loading. Large, unapologetically full-width photography is worth a slightly more careful approach to lazy-loading and responsive srcsets than a typical brochure site — the whole design promise falls apart if it’s also slow.

It’s a smaller build than most of what I write about here, but it’s one of the ones I’m happiest with. Sometimes the best technical decision is deciding what not to build.