Field & Form had twelve years of completed projects and no good way to show them. The previous portfolio was a Cargo template that compressed everything into thumbnails. They wanted each project to breathe — and they wanted both English and Chinese reads to feel native, not translated.
An MDX-backed archive with a custom case-study template: tall hero image, project metadata strip, longform body, technical drawings inlined. The whole thing renders in EN and ZH with locale-aware typography. Image performance gets a lot of attention — full-bleed photography that still loads cleanly on a 4G connection.
Custom-tier projects don't fit into a fixed cycle, but this one ran 18 days end-to-end. Week one: information architecture, typography system, and the first three project pages. Week two: bilingual implementation, archive index, image pipeline. Day 18: cutover.
Bilingual sites benefit from designing the Chinese type stack first. Latin type adapts to a CJK rhythm more gracefully than the reverse — we now start every multilingual project with the heavier script.
“It's the first version of our portfolio that I actually want to send to people.”