A studio that tells other
people's stories — finally telling its own.

The client

A Windsor videographer who grew into a studio — and needed a home to match.

Created by Gabbs is founded by Gabby Gibbs, a videographer based in Windsor, Ontario. What started as one person behind a camera has grown into a small collective of creatives shooting weddings, events, and brand content across Southwestern Ontario. The work is intimate and film-forward — the kind of storytelling couples and brands come back to.

The studio already had a defined brand: a refined palette, an editorial voice, and a clear sense of taste. What it didn't have was a website that carried any of it. Bookings and enquiries were happening through social alone — and a growing studio needs a front door that does more than exist.

The challenge

Booking a videographer is an emotional decision. The site had to feel, not just inform.

Couples don't hire a wedding videographer on price. They hire on feeling — on whether a studio's work makes them picture their own day in it. That means the website can't read like a services brochure. It has to carry the same emotional weight as the films themselves, in a medium that is mostly type and stills.

The second challenge was fidelity. The client arrived with a genuine brand — specific colours, a display typeface, an editorial layout language. A generic template would have flattened all of it. The site had to be a faithful extension of the brand system, not a compromise stitched around a theme.

And it had to scale. Created by Gabbs is a growing collective, not a solo operator — the site needed room for a team, an expanding portfolio, and new service lines without a rebuild every time the studio adds a name.

The approach

Build the brand into the code — not around it.

Rather than fit the brand to a framework, we rebuilt the brand as a framework. Every colour, typeface, and spacing rule from the handoff became a design token in the codebase, so the whole site speaks one visual language and any future page inherits it for free.

• Brand palette encoded as tokens — Cream (#FFF6EA), deep green (#3E594C) for text and dark sections, and a sage tint (#E7E3D2) for alternating bands, with sage-olive accents (#738561 / #A7A376). Defined once as CSS custom properties and reused everywhere — never a stray hex.
• Editorial typography system — A display face for headlines paired with a refined serif for long-form copy and a clean sans for UI, all self-hosted via next/font/local for instant, layout-shift-free loading. Cinzel currently stands in for the studio's licensed display face and swaps in with a single token change once the licence lands.
• Hairline editorial layout — A restrained, magazine-style system built on thin rules, generous whitespace, and asymmetric composition. The design gets out of the way and lets the film work carry the page.
• Six pages, one language — Home, About, Work, Investment, Team, and Contact — each distinct, all built from the same components and tokens so the studio reads as one brand end to end.
• Team-ready architecture — The About and Team pages are structured around a growing collective: founder, collective headshots, and duo cards, with slots that accept new members without touching layout code.
• Owned contact pipeline — The enquiry form posts JSON to an Everex Forms endpoint — the same self-hosted form infrastructure we run for other clients — so leads land in the studio's inbox with no third-party form service and no per-submission fee.
• Controlled pre-launch gate — A branded coming-soon screen fronts the live domain while the studio finalises assets, with a private preview link that reveals the full site to the client and stakeholders on demand.

Brand palette

Typography

Technical stack

The site is a fully static Next.js build — no runtime database, no CMS overhead, nothing to go down. It auto-deploys on every push to GitHub via Vercel and sits on the studio's own domain. Fast, cheap to run, and simple enough that a copy change ships in minutes.

The result

A site that reads like the studio's own work.

Created by Gabbs went from a brand handoff to a complete, launch-ready website — six pages, a fully tokenised design system, and an owned enquiry pipeline. It carries the studio's editorial restraint from the first fold to the contact form, and it's built to grow as the collective does.

What's next

The build is done. The launch layer comes next.

The site is complete and staged. The remaining work is the last mile before the coming-soon gate comes down — and the growth layer that follows.

• Final photography swap — Real wedding, event, and engagement work drops into the portfolio grids and hero, replacing the last placeholder frames.
• Licensed display font — Swapping the stand-in display face for the studio's licensed typeface — a single token change once the licence is confirmed.
• Form endpoint go-live — Wiring the contact form to the production Everex Forms endpoint so enquiries flow the moment the site is public.
• Launch — Removing the coming-soon gate and taking createdbygabbs.com fully live.
• SEO foundation — Structured data, meta, and location-specific content to build organic visibility for Windsor-area videography searches.
• Ongoing content — A pipeline to keep the portfolio and social presence fresh as new work comes in.