Somefolk® Digital

Somefolk® is one designer and a rotating cast of collaborators, which makes it a genuinely awkward thing to put on a website. Present it as a studio and it overpromises; present it as a personal portfolio and it undersells the collaborative work entirely.

The site had to hold both readings at once without explaining itself.

Credit as the organising principle

Rather than hide the collaboration, we made it the structure. Every project lists everyone who touched it, in full, and each name is a filter — so the site can be read as one designer's portfolio, as a network, or as a single project, depending on where you enter.

It resolved the positioning problem without a paragraph of positioning copy, which is generally the better way to solve one.

A mobile-first case-study format

Two thirds of the traffic to work like this arrives from a phone, via a link in a message, and leaves within forty seconds. So the case study was designed for that visit first: one image, one sentence, the credits, and then the long version underneath for anyone still reading.

The desktop layout is the same content given more room, not a different document.

What changed

Enquiries went up, but the more useful change was in their shape: far more of them now arrive naming a specific collaborator or a specific discipline, which is exactly the kind of work Somefolk® wanted more of.

The site has since absorbed two years of new projects without structural changes.