New Website, New Design

The old Squarespace site did its job, but it was never really mine. It was a template filled in with my content, and over time it started to feel less like a studio and more like a flyer. So I decided to rebuild the whole thing from the ground up — this time hosted here on Lovable, with a design built around the work rather than around a drag-and-drop grid.

The new homepage leads with the showreel. That was the whole point of the redesign: when someone lands on Creative Bandit Studios, the first thing they should meet is the work itself — not a logo, not a menu, not a pitch. The showreel autoplays as soon as the page loads, so the studio introduces itself in motion before it ever asks you to click anything.

The look is dark, cinematic, and deliberate. Black backgrounds, a single orange accent, and condensed uppercase typography that leans into the film-poster feel rather than the corporate-portfolio feel. Every page — the portfolio, the DevLog, the achievements, the about — shares that same language, so the site reads as one continuous piece rather than a collection of unrelated screens.

The achievements page is the other big change. Instead of a few static badges, it now pulls in the full festival record: every submission, every selection, every award, finalist and honourable mention, filterable by project and result. It is the most honest picture of where the work has actually landed — 16 wins across 57 honours from 98 submissions — and it updates as the record grows.

Behind the scenes, the site is built on TanStack Start with Tailwind, which means it is fast, it is properly routed, and it is easy for me to extend without fighting a page builder. The DevLog you are reading right now is part of that — a real, editable record rather than a blog post squeezed into a fixed template.

There is still more to come: the domain is moving over from Squarespace, and I have plenty of ideas for how to keep evolving the site as the studio grows. But for now, this is the new home of Creative Bandit Studios — built for the work, and finally built the way I wanted it.

Welcome to the new site.