A 70s grindhouse slasher dropped on the web. A producer's whole catalog, staged as a case file the visitor has to investigate.
PAULO is a producer with a real catalog and no home for it online. The links lived scattered across streaming platforms and an Instagram bio. The ask was a single site that felt like the music: loud, physical, and a little dangerous. Not a tidy link-in-bio. A world.
The concept we landed on: treat the artist like the subject of a 70s grindhouse slasher. The visitor is not browsing a discography. They are working a case. "WHO IS PAULO?" is the question the whole site is built to answer.
Direction: Exploitation-poster typography, a dripping red question mark as the logo, film grain, vignette, and a stray cigarette burn over the frame. Anton for the screaming display type, Special Elite for the typewritten case notes, Courier Prime for the body. The palette is deliberately tight: blood red, bone, and a near-black that reads like a darkened theater.
Structure: A hero title card, then Case Files (the discography, with Spotify embeds for every release), a Suspect Profile dossier, a "Want A Beat That Kills" inquiry section that routes beat requests straight to Instagram DMs, and a "Report A Sighting" block for socials. Every section reinforces the conceit instead of breaking it.
System first: Built in Figma with brand color variables, bound paint styles, and text styles across a style guide, a 1440 desktop, and a 390 mobile frame. The design system was the source of truth, so the build was a translation, not a guess.
Hand-rolled HTML, CSS, and vanilla JS following the studio's Figma-to-Vercel playbook. No framework, no build step, fast to load and easy to maintain. The grain, vignette, and reveal animations are CSS and a thin layer of JS, and they all degrade gracefully on touch and respect reduced-motion preferences.
Shipped: Pushed to a GitHub repo wired to Vercel, so every push to main auto-deploys. Live and maintained at who-is-paulo.vercel.app.
An artist site should feel like the artist, not like a template someone forgot to theme. The win here was committing fully to a single idea and letting it shape every decision, from the font choices to where the beat-inquiry button sends you. Concept-led, system-built, shipped live.
Artists, founders, and people with a strong point of view. If a template would flatten what makes your thing yours, that is the kind of work we are built for.