Founded in 2014, Boulder, Colorado–based product-focused design firm Emerson Stone crafts memorable brands and digital experiences for its clients. Influenced by traditional, midcentury design firms in its layout and illustration styles, Emerson Stone’s site is no less memorable, offering a distinctively editorial feel that encourages visitors to not only treat the site like a portfolio site, but also as a source of inspiration. Various case studies into Emerson Stone’s portfolio provide a window into the design firm’s creative process and its relationship with its clients. The navigation bar at the top only displays the four main pages with several others hidden under a hamburger menu titled More; this includes a page for Emerson Stone’s initiative, Free Design Friday, in which the design firm opens its doors to local Boulder businesses for a talk on their branding and strategy. An interactive contact form walks visitors through the process of describing themselves and the project they want done as it slowly takes over the Contact page. 

Created with JavaScript, PHP and Sass and built in Craft CMS, Emerson Stone’s site also holds the dual purpose of featuring a remarkable fix to a common Craft error. “With the amount of content and traffic on the site, we were dealing with a number of server issues including timeouts, server crashes and poor caching,” says Andy Stone, cofounder and creative director of Emerson Stone. “Our lead developer ended up creating custom workarounds for the Craft platform and published his findings after the site went live—the article is currently getting a lot of attention around the Craft community as it solved a number of development problems.” Implementing its own strategy when creating sites, Emerson Stone reused twenty modular components throughout the site and four unique ones to let its design team quickly create new pages while keeping a consistent look and feel. Since its launch, the site has received upwards of 20,000 visitors and has garnered accolades from DesignerNews and Typewolf.