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The studio's first client was itself.

ClientLiana StudioServicesWebsite · CMSYear2026TimelineSix weeks
Abstract still life of a folded wireframe sketch, type specimen cards and a terracotta tile, evoking a studio building its own website
[ site preview ]
The story

How we built liana.studio

For the first few years the studio ran on a website that was really a portfolio glued together in a page builder — fine for a while, useless the moment we started saying yes to bigger, more technical work. Every new case study meant copying a page and hoping nothing broke. There was no system underneath it, only habit.

So when we finally had a slow month, we gave ourselves the brief we'd normally hand a client: a site built on a proper CMS, with every section a block someone could rearrange without touching code, and a design system tight enough that changing one color variable would ripple through the whole thing. No shortcuts, because it was ours.

The build surfaced problems we'd only ever seen from a client's side of the table — an image that didn't quite cover its frame, a pricing page repeating a promise it couldn't keep on every plan, a stats row that looked lopsided the moment a number got removed. Fixing them on our own site taught us more about the pattern than any client engagement had, because there was no deadline telling us to ship the fix and move on.

Six weeks later the studio had a site it could actually stand behind — and its first, most honest case study.

01 — The brief

Build our own site the way we'd build a client's.

01No fixed pages. Every section — team, pricing, quotes, stats — had to be a block a client could add, remove or reorder themselves.
02No copy we couldn't hand off. If a client can't edit a headline without calling us, the field is wrong, not the client.
03One design system. Colors, type scale and spacing set once, as variables, so changing a token changes the whole site in unison.
04Two people, a few weeks — the same process we sell, not a shortcut version of it.
[ detail still ]
[ type specimen ]
02 — What we built

A slice-zone architecture instead of a stack of fixed pages.

01Payload CMS on Postgres feeding typed content straight into Next.js — no separate API layer to keep in sync.
02A generic sliceZone pattern: every page is an ordered list of reusable blocks, not a bespoke template.
03Shared primitives — buttons, headlines, media boxes — reused across every block instead of redrawn per page.
04Real content in every field from day one: case studies, pricing, FAQs — nothing shipped as lorem ipsum.
Where it landed

Six weeks, two people, one live site.

6wBrief to launch2People who built it100%Client-editable, block by block
We treated our own brief like a client's — no shortcuts, no unfinished blocks. If we wouldn't ship it to a customer, it didn't ship here either.Nora FeldDesign lead, Liana Studio

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