Digeo Collective: a website built to launch a new name

Digeo Collective went public with a new name in September 2026. The site had to be ready on the same day, carry twenty years of work that had never been gathered in one place, and be something a five person team could keep up to date without ringing us. We designed and built it.

The outcome

A Next.js and Sanity website, live on launch day. Five long form case studies, a twenty six person team page, four service pillars, six sectors, and an enquiry form that lands in the inbox. Every word and image on it is editable by the team through a Studio built into the site itself, and the whole thing renders in the brand we had just finished writing.

The challenge

Two problems, arriving at once. The first was that the new name only means something if the site proves it, so the collective had to be visible rather than asserted. The second was that Digeo had two decades of work for publishers and charities scattered across drives, YouTube and old project folders, none of it written up. A portfolio nobody can find is the same as no portfolio.

Underneath both sat the practical one. This is a production company, not a tech team. Anything that needed a developer to change was going to go stale inside six months.

Our approach

Build it out of the brand, not next to it. The guidelines were finished first, so the site is not an interpretation of them. Periwinkle, charcoal, lime and mist are the exact hex values from the palette page. Host Grotesk and DM Sans are the same two Google faces, loaded through Next.js so they are served from the site itself rather than fetched from Google on every visit. The scribble underlines and doodles are the brand components, used to the same contrast rule.

Lead with the work. The homepage puts a film first, then names the collective, then shows the work. The Our Work page is a filtered grid that sorts by service, so a publisher looking for educational video and a charity looking for documentary land in different places without either of them reading a list they do not care about.

Give every project a real case study. Five of them, written from scratch: Oxford University Press English File, Blue Dot and Idiomatic, Macmillan Education Unique, and Barnardos Keeping Safe. Each one carries a hero film, the brief, the outcome, the client relationship in years, and the sector. This is the part that did not exist before, and it is the part that does the selling.

Get the hero films off YouTube. The case study films kept dying with Error 153, which is YouTube refusing to allow embedding after a Content ID claim on the music. Two library tracks were enough to break three pages. We pulled the masters, stripped the audio and re-encoded them with ffmpeg, and now serve them from the site as MP4s. They autoplay silently behind the case study titles, they cannot be claimed, and they cannot be taken down by a rights bot on a Sunday.

Put the whole collective on the page. Twenty six people across three groups: the core team who lead direction and production, the collaborators who come in per project as camera operators, editors, sound designers, writers and makeup artists, and the content creators. A partner studio in Birmingham sits alongside them. It is the single most convincing thing on the site, because the network model stops being a claim the moment you can see the names.

Sell the model before the services. What We Do runs four pillars: educational video, documentary and interviews, animation and motion, and full production. Each one gets its own colour block, a real still from Digeo work and a route back into the case studies. Nothing on that page is a service list with a stock photograph over it.

Name the sectors out loud. Education and ELT, publishing, charities and NGOs, cultural organisations, universities, creative agencies. Six named sectors with the client logos above them, because the original strategy problem was over reliance on one publisher, and the fastest way to be considered for the other five is to say plainly that you work in them.

Make the enquiry the easy part. A three step explanation of how a project actually starts, then a short form that asks for the brief in a few lines rather than demanding a specification. It posts through a server action and arrives as email, with no third party form service sitting between Digeo and the person trying to hire them.

Ship it locked down. Content Security Policy, HSTS, X-Frame-Options, no sniffing, and a permissions policy that switches off camera, microphone, geolocation and payments. The one deliberate exception is the Studio route, which is exempt from the CSP because Sanity loads its own authentication bridge and a strict policy stops the editor booting. Alongside that: a generated sitemap, a robots file, and structured data for the organisation, the breadcrumbs and every case study film.

See it live

The finished site is at digeoproductions.com.

What it does for Digeo Collective

A launch that landed on the day it was meant to, with somewhere for every post to point. The collective is now visible instead of described, which is the whole argument for the new name. Twenty years of work is written up, findable and organised by the sectors Digeo wants more of. And the team can add a case study, a person or a testimonial themselves, so the site will still be true in a year without anyone having to ask us.

Credits

• Client: Digeo Collective
• Studio: Alchemy, design and build
• Build: Next.js 16 and React 19, Tailwind CSS v4, deployed on Vercel
• CMS: Sanity, with the Studio embedded in the site at /studio
• Typefaces: Host Grotesk and DM Sans, self hosted through Next.js
• Film, photography and behind the scenes footage: Digeo Collective
• Launched: September 2026, alongside the rebrand