Rowan Price — Illustrator Portfolio

Built to show and built to sell

Rowan came to the project with a look that already turns heads: bright, dense, unmistakably his. The challenge was never making it bold. It was turning that boldness into a working tool he can sell from and run himself.

Two things had to be true.

It had to close the sale at the booth. Rowan works conventions and events, and his best pitch is often "check out my site." The first place most people see it is on their own phone, right there in the conversation, so the site has to land on mobile looking exactly like the table they're standing at, and give them somewhere to go when they want something that isn't in front of them.

It had to be his to run. This is a bespoke site, not a template, but bespoke shouldn't mean calling your developer every time the stock changes. Rowan needs to add, edit, and manage his own work and storefront, with the same content-management and e-commerce conveniences people assume only a WordPress and WooCommerce setup can offer.

Built around how he works

Rowan had already designed the hardest pages to get right, the home and about pages that set the whole tone. My job was to carry that voice through the rest of the site and make it do real work.

Built to show. I extended Rowan's design language across the pages he hadn't tackled, keeping the density, the character, and the energy intact rather than flattening them into something easier to build. The priority throughout is mobile: since most people will first meet this site on their phone, pulled up mid-conversation at a booth, it has to hit the small screen with the same impact as the desktop version, not a stripped-down echo of it.

Built to sell. The storefront is where I'm most deliberate, because the wrong e-commerce choice is one Rowan pays for later. I'm weighing every option against three things that matter to his business, not mine: he has to be able to update it himself, without touching code or waiting on me; it can't lock him into a heavy monthly cost before he knows what he's earning; and it has to grow with him instead of becoming something he outgrows. Bespoke doesn't mean he loses the conveniences of an off-the-shelf shop, it means those conveniences get chosen around him.