Case study · Website · 2026
Thompson Placemaking.
An architecture studio's portfolio site moves off Squarespace onto Next.js — preserving the watercolor master plans the firm is known for at higher fidelity.
Website · MigrationCase study · Website · 2026
An architecture studio's portfolio site moves off Squarespace onto Next.js — preserving the watercolor master plans the firm is known for at higher fidelity.
Website · MigrationThe problem
Thompson Placemaking does Traditional Neighborhood Design — large master plans hand-illustrated in watercolor, individual home designs in the Southern vernacular, and a clear point of view about how a neighborhood ought to feel to walk through. The brand identity — script wordmark, watercolor library, photography style — was already strong and already the firm's own work. This wasn't a brand engagement.
Squarespace was getting in the way. Image compression flattened the watercolor detail that's central to how the firm sells the work. Page-speed scores sat in the middle band. And the templated feel didn't match an architecture practice that spends weeks on a single illustration.
The job: lift the existing brand untouched onto a stack that respects it.
The approach
We rebuilt the site on Next.js 16 + Vercel with a custom design system that defers to the existing identity. The script wordmark, the watercolor illustration library, the photography palette — none of it changed. What changed was the engine.
next/image with high-quality WebP variants does the heavy lifting on the watercolor illustrations. Each one ships at multiple resolutions so the Flowood District master plan looks like an actual painting at 320px on a phone and at retina laptop sizes.
Static-generated end to end. Mike updates the site infrequently and a CMS would have been overhead. Content lives in structured TypeScript files; updates are commits.
The script wordmark, the watercolor library, the photography style, the voice — all pre-existing. We touched none of it. The job here was the substrate underneath, not the surface.
Image quality, page speed, and SEO control all needed to come up. Next.js handles all three natively; Squarespace was capping the ceiling on each.
Architecture portfolio content changes monthly at most. SSG keeps the site fast, eliminates a CMS dependency, and means there's no admin to keep maintained. Mike edits structured data and pushes.
Every illustration ships at multiple WebP resolutions with deliberate sizes attributes. Watercolor doesn't survive aggressive compression — the pipeline is set up to preserve grain at every viewport.
The outcome
DNS cut over on June 7, 2026. The new site replaced the Squarespace build at thompsonplacemaking.com with zero downtime for end users.
Image fidelity is dramatically better — the watercolors actually look like watercolors. Page-speed scores moved from middling to near-perfect. And the site reads, from the first scroll, as made for this firm instead of made for the platform's template.
Mike updates content via small TypeScript edits and a git push. No Squarespace billing. No template constraints. The brand identity carries forward unchanged; the engine under it now matches the craftsmanship of the work it presents.
What we shipped
Related work
Talk to us
Tell me what's on your bench — brand, site, app, design work, printing, migration off something painful. We'll figure out together whether Brand Forge is the right shop.
