JTBookDesignneeded to feel like a book designer's site, not a freelance template with a new logo dropped on top.
The work itself already had taste and range. The real job was to build a portfolio that carried the same sense of control, gave the typography room to do its part, and made a sizeable catalogue of covers and interiors easy to move through.
The Brief
Jason Thompson is a book designer with seventeen years of experience across covers, interior typesetting, EPUB work, and print production. A standard portfolio layout would have flattened that immediately. Too many web portfolios treat every project the same way. Thumbnail, heading, paragraph, repeat. That was not going to be enough here.
The site needed a stronger point of view. Something quieter. More editorial. More paced. It had to respect the work rather than package it like stock content.
What the Site Had to Do
There were a few non-negotiables from the start. The site had to feel distinct. It had to hold a large amount of portfolio content without turning noisy. And it had to stay manageable once new work was added later.
Present the portfolio more like a volume than a sales brochure
Give fiction, non-fiction, and coffee-table work their own space and rhythm
Make the content easy to edit in Statamic without relying on code changes for every update
Keep the design restrained enough that the books stayed in front
The Direction
The visual direction came from print rather than current web fashion. Dark background. Gold accents. Large display type. Thin rules. Plenty of negative space. Section names and page labels were treated more like chapter markers than interface furniture.
That decision shaped the whole site. Home became a cover page. About became a preface. Work became a proper contents-led portfolio instead of an endless scroll of cards. Services and contact kept the same tone, which helped the whole thing read as one piece rather than five separate pages pretending to be related.
Typography did a lot of the heavy lifting. It needed presence, but it also had to stay readable against a black background and sit comfortably beside detailed book imagery. Small refinements to stroke, weight, and spacing made a real difference there.
The Build
The site was built with Laravel and Statamic, using a small set of custom content components rather than one oversized flexible page builder. That kept the editing experience focused and let each section behave the way it needed to.
Custom section types for hero, editorial text, contents, selected plates, preface, services, and contact
Structured portfolio content grouped by fiction, non-fiction, and coffee-table work
Tailwind-based styling tuned around print-inspired typography and spacing
A content model that makes later copy and portfolio updates straightforward
That structure matters. When a site depends on one-off hardcoded sections, it starts to fight back the moment content changes. This one was built so the tone stays intact without making day-to-day editing awkward.
The Outcome
JTBookDesign now feels much closer to the work it represents. The site has its own atmosphere, but it does not crowd the books. It gives the portfolio shape, gives the writing a voice, and gives the client something they can keep extending without breaking the tone.
That was the point. Build a portfolio site with enough restraint to stay out of the way, and enough character to be worth remembering.