Monolith Studio — Premium Agency Portfolio Rebuilt on Framer
A complete portfolio overhaul for a London-based brand and motion design agency — replacing a 4-year-old Squarespace site with a motion-rich Framer build, CMS-managed case studies, and Vimeo-optimised video showcases that load without killing performance.
98
Lighthouse performance score
3 wks
Design to live
−54%
Bounce rate reduction
4 new
Client wins in 90 days
The challenge
Monolith Studio is a 12-person brand and motion design agency based in London, working with mid-market and enterprise clients across fashion, technology, and hospitality. Their team produces film-quality brand work — but their Squarespace portfolio site hadn't been meaningfully updated since 2021 and looked like it belonged to a different agency entirely. Videos took 12 seconds to start playing. The case study pages were a wall of text with tiny thumbnails. On mobile, half the animations were broken.
Their new business lead estimated they were losing 2–3 serious enquiries per month to competitors with better portfolios. Prospective clients would reference other agencies' sites in briefings, which the team found demoralising given the quality of their own output. The founding creative director put the brief simply: the site needed to be as good as the work it was showing. They had 22 case studies to migrate, a library of Vimeo-hosted video reels, and a strong preference for being able to update work independently without going back to a developer every time.
What we built
We built the new Monolith Studio site on Framer in 3 weeks — 7 core pages with Framer CMS powering all 22 case study entries, custom scroll-triggered animations throughout, and a Vimeo embed system that lazy-loads video content without blocking page performance. The studio now publishes new case studies in under 15 minutes without any external help.
- 7-page Framer site — Home, Work index, Case Study template (CMS), About, Services, and Contact — with Framer CMS managing all 22 project entries
- Custom scroll-triggered entrance animations and page transitions using Framer motion variants — each section has a distinct reveal pattern tied to the brand's editorial aesthetic
- Performance-optimised Vimeo embeds with a click-to-load poster image pattern — videos only load on user interaction, keeping Lighthouse scores intact despite video-heavy content
- Password-protected client showcase pages for NDA work — three active clients required a separate access layer for their full case study content
- Tally form integration for new business enquiries, with conditional logic routing by service type — brand identity, motion, and web inquiries route to different team inboxes via Make automations
The results
The new site launched in week 3. Within 30 days, portfolio bounce rate dropped from 68% to 31% — a 54% reduction. Average session duration more than doubled, from 1:12 to 2:48. The Lighthouse performance score came in at 98 on desktop despite the motion-heavy design, and the LCP on mobile hit 1.1 seconds — well inside Core Web Vitals thresholds.
Four new project briefs came in within 90 days of launch — two of which the team directly attributed to prospects mentioning the new portfolio site in their opening call. One brief came from a brand director who had worked with a competing agency for three years but switched after finding Monolith's new site through a Google search. The founding director told us: "For the first time, sending someone to our site actually helps our new business process rather than getting in the way of it."
