Sanity & Next.js agency for creative & media

Portfolios, publishers and entertainment brands get judged on presentation before anyone reads a word, and the work is usually heavy: large photography, video, animation, daily editorial output. The build has to carry that without the page paying for it.

Mario Testino's site came to us in a bad state after a previous migration: broken Vercel pipelines, 200% overages on Sanity, and 160 missing redirects. We stripped the project back to vanilla Sanity, removed the deprecated dependencies and abandoned libraries it had accumulated, and rewrote every page, image implementation and data query.

Global Cycling Network needed editorial velocity at a different scale. Riders join teams, leave teams and win tours, so we broke people, bikes and teams into small reusable parts that hot-swap: build a rider profile once and every page and article referencing them updates. On top of that sits a system of slug nodes and slug clusters up to four levels deep, with GROQ handling the routing, so new sections and paths get created editorially across thousands of documents.

Sanity and Next.js on Vercel is the usual answer for image-heavy editorial, because the image handling and the publishing loop are the two things that decide whether the site is pleasant to run. Next.js image optimization covers right-sizing, device pixel ratio and lazy loading, and Sanity's hotspot controls keep a photograph framed properly from phone to retina display.

The stack follows the brief rather than the reverse. The Bang Co runs on Gatsby with Prismic, with a custom build process that loads their After Effects animations without denting core performance metrics. Simply Thrilled needed a video portfolio on a minimal budget in three weeks, so we built a performance-optimized Webflow MVP instead of something they could not afford to maintain. Bulletproof kept their application and moved the infrastructure from AWS to Vercel, with the localization layer restructured onto Next.js native i18n.

Where video is central, it goes to a platform built for it. Topaz Labs' documentation uses Mux, which compresses and streams each video at the size appropriate to the device and connection.

Mario Testino's 200% Sanity overages went away, all 160 missing redirects were fixed, and structured data was rebuilt with JSON-LD alongside Francesco, their SEO expert, who tracked the recovery daily. Organic visibility climbed back and the site crawls cleanly. Publishing stopped being a waiting game once the Live Content API replaced the publish-and-wait cycle, and the team has since added Selected Press and MT World without developer involvement.

Bulletproof's builds went from 30 minutes to 4, an 87% reduction, through incremental static regeneration and a reworked build toolchain, with no application rewrite.

The Bang Co gets sub-second page loads across every portfolio piece and 95+ Lighthouse performance scores while carrying their animation work. Simply Thrilled launched two days before a three-week deadline and won an NHS project featuring Vicky McClure shortly after.

Image-heavy sites fail in predictable ways, and most of them are editorial rather than technical. If an editor has to prepare exports by hand, the site degrades the moment they are busy. The Bang Co's pipelines generate WebP, JPG and PNG automatically so the right format is served without anyone deciding. Teckro's media is optimized on the fly for the same reason.

Design discipline is the other constraint. Session needed staggered layouts and masonry grids held to strict motion guidelines, so the components we built are flexible enough for those layouts without the restrictions a template imposes, and Sanity Studio Content Previews let the team experiment before deploying. That build was made with Motto, to their creative direction.

Editorial control over placement matters too. Global Cycling Network's team can cherry-pick news articles to the top of a section, which covers popular and sponsored placement, and their Storybook environment was built out from a handful of components to every component on the site, each with tests covering fallback behavior.