Seeds of Renaissance Website — Design Brief

Draft 2026-09-28. Read brand.md first for who we are, what we offer, who it's for and how we sound. This doc covers only the design job.

The job

Find the look and feel for the new Seeds of Renaissance website. Show it by rebuilding a few real pages, then choose a direction together (Sylvie is the decision-maker on brand).

Starting clean

The visual search is open. No palette, typeface, layout or mark is carried over from the 2R site, the May 2R design system, the Canva deck or colour notes in brand documents. Reference sites, moodboards and sample images are inspiration, not instructions.

What the design must do

• Feel like a living world, not an organisation's brochure. It should be alive, not archival.
• Hold art and rigour together, so neither is reduced to decoration.
• Carry different registers (lucid entry pages, poetic manifesto and magazine, rigorous essays; see brand.md) while clearly being one thing.
• Make the first step easy for someone who only has a feeling: listen, read, subscribe, come to something.
• Handle long-form reading beautifully.
• Reward the second look.

Pages to mock (real content in content/)

Later: podcast station page, course/event page, Instagram templates.

Process

1. Gather references (see moodboard/) with a line each on what we take from them.
2. Produce 3–4 distinct directions, each shown by rebuilding the home and one or two of the real pages.
3. Compare them side by side, then choose and refine.
4. Build out the remaining pages, then extract tokens and components.

Not in scope yet

Sitemap and IA, platform and build, the final domain, the mark or logo (open, decided alongside direction).