Vagabond

About Vagabond

Vagabond is a boutique production and design company that creates, designs, builds and delivers projects for television, live events, award ceremonies and brands. The work runs from an initial conversation through to installation, pretty much anywhere in the world, and covers production design, creative direction, technical direction and full design implementation.

The portfolio is unusually broad: streaming, quiz shows, sport, chat shows, podcasts, political programming, reality, entertainment, car shows, cookery formats and, by their own account, one amazing show involving cats. Standalone design and consultancy work sits alongside the full production projects.

The Challenge

Most website briefs start with what the business does. This one started with how it had to look.

When a company sells design itself, its website is not a description of the service. It is a sample of it. A production designer whose own site looks ordinary has already answered the only question a prospective client is really asking, and answered it badly. Nothing about a stock layout, however tidy, survives that test.

So the brief was exact, and it was a design brief rather than a content brief. Vagabond knew what they wanted the site to feel like, how the work should be framed, how much space it needed and what should be left out. Our job was not to interpret it loosely and make suggestions. It was to build precisely that.

That is harder than it sounds, because the usual shortcuts are all closed. You cannot reach for a proven layout and adjust the colours. Every decision has to be made deliberately, and each one has to hold up next to the client's own work.

What We Built

We built Vagabond a completely bespoke website, designed to their brief rather than assembled from a pattern we already had. The design leads with the work and gets out of its way. Projects are organised by genre, so a producer looking for quiz show credentials or a sports format can find the relevant work without wading through everything else, and each strand has room to be seen properly rather than being reduced to a thumbnail in a grid.

The About and Meet the Team sections carry the parts of the pitch that images cannot: the range of genres covered, the standalone design and consultancy offer, and the plain commitment to deliver to brief, to schedule and to any budget.

Underneath the design sits the same foundation every site we build gets. A mobile responsive layout, fast loading, secure hosting, SSL, daily backups, a clean heading structure and the SEO groundwork that lets a specialist business be found by name and by discipline. None of it is visible, which on this project was the point.

The Result

Vagabond now has a website that reads as a piece of their work rather than as a description of it. When a broadcaster, production company or brand arrives from a credit, a recommendation or a search, the first impression matches the standard of the projects in the portfolio.

For a business that wins work on creative judgement, that consistency is the entire job. There is no second chance to establish that the studio is the real thing.

Why It Worked

The temptation with a demanding design brief is to talk the client down to something easier to build. We think that is backwards. A brief that specific is usually the product of people who have thought hard about their own positioning, and the right response is to build it, not to negotiate it.

It is also worth saying that bespoke does not have to mean expensive. Vagabond's site runs on the same pay monthly plan as every site we build, with hosting, SSL, backups, CMS access and real human support included and nothing large to pay upfront. If you would like to see the range of what we build, our portfolio is the fastest way in, and our pay monthly web design page explains how the model works.

Common questions