Overview

NorthHouse is a London creative studio behind some of the most ambitious live productions of recent years. World-class credentials, generic positioning. I led the full engagement: brand strategy, visual identity, copywriting, and Framer build.

Challenge

The brief wasn't just a new website — it was a repositioning. NorthHouse had the credits; what they lacked was language and a visual system that matched the scale of the work. The site also had to carry 33 project case studies, each with high-quality showreel video, which introduced a real infrastructure problem: how do you build a video-heavy portfolio site without it becoming slow, expensive, or brittle?

Approach

Brand strategy came first — developing a positioning architecture and visual identity system (Monument/Spectrum typographic directions) that could hold the tension between two internal creative voices: a founder who wanted professional authority and a creative lead who wanted editorial edge. The resolution was a primary system with room for expressive moments rather than a compromise in either direction. On the build side, I designed and developed the full Framer site including a custom CMS schema for all 33 projects, masonry layout, and a filterable portfolio system. Video hosting was solved with Mux — adaptive streaming via a bare video tag rather than a player, keeping the chrome invisible and the load lightweight — after ruling out Cloudflare R2 for a project at this video volume and quality level.

Outcome

Site launched on schedule, the studio now has a platform and a positioning that reflects the actual calibre of the work.