WANTED
A digital buyer's guide, lifestyle publication and e-commerce ecosystem sharing one surface, built on WordPress for the vanguard of architecture, design and luxury goods.
The brief
Wanted Media Group needed a home for WANTED: real-time coverage of exceptional consumer products for an audience that treats restraint as a signal of quality. That audience judges the site the way it judges the products in it, so the design had to hold a standard rather than chase attention.
The challenge
Minimalism and commerce pull in opposite directions. A shop wants urgency, badges, contrast and repetition; a curated guide earns its trust by withholding all of that. The site had to make a considered object feel considered while still being where a purchase decision gets made. And a publication covering products in real time only works if the client can publish without a developer, so whatever was built had to be genuinely operable by an editorial team rather than merely handed over to one.
How I ran it
- 01Designed a system restrained enough that the products carry the page, with typography and spacing doing the work colour and ornament usually do.
- 02Resolved three reading modes, deciding, browsing and buying, into one navigation model, so the site never reads as three sites wearing the same skin.
- 03Built on WordPress because the deciding factor was who maintains it after launch: a publication covering products in real time needs a CMS its editors own, not a build that needs a developer for every post.
- 04Built the Wanted Plugin, a post-driven magazine grid for Elementor: square article tiles interleaved with full-width feature banners, with live category filtering, sorting and AJAX load-more. Elementor's stock post widgets produce a uniform grid, and the rhythm this design needed, runs of square tiles punctuated by a banner, cannot be composed from them.
- 05Made that grid post-driven rather than hand-laid, so the editorial team publishes and the layout composes itself, while filtering and load-more keep browsing continuous instead of bouncing readers through page reloads.
What I managed
- Art direction
- Design system
- UI/UX design
- WordPress build
- Custom Elementor plugins
Designed and built solo in four weeks, and now run entirely by the client's editorial team: the grid composes itself from published posts, so no one lays out a page and no developer is needed to publish.
- Live, and maintained by the client's editorial team with no developer involvement.
- A new article takes its place in the grid on publish, so nobody lays out a page.
- Designed, built and delivered solo in four weeks.
Have a project like this?
I’m available for project management and delivery work. Tell me what you’re building and let’s map it out.