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Atelier [2026]
A hand-painted, scroll-driven site and a free AI tool for a Substack positioning studio. I designed and built both.
psst, the stickers can be moved: drag them around
The brief: experts with real standing in their field who are invisible on Substack. The site has to explain the problem, prove the studio can fix it, sell three published-price offers without sounding like an agency, and capture leads with no CRM.
Scrolling down is climbing up: one long ascent up a painted cliffside maison, 12 sections, a pricing climb where each rung lights a lantern, a shaft of sun that follows the cursor, and lily-bloom page transitions.
The Authority Scorecard: paste your Substack and "The Editor" reads the actual publication, scores it out of 100 across seven dimensions, quotes it in every judgement, and hands back a PDF read and a shareable Authority ID card.
Under the hood: Astro and Tailwind on Cloudflare, a separate worker that fetches the homepage, feed, About page and up to six posts and calls Claude, a daily budget against abuse, and a rule never to guess: anything unverifiable is marked, not invented.
Every quiz and Scorecard run lands as a lead in a Google Sheet through Apps Script, with an instant receipt and one well-timed nudge: no CRM, no paid tools.
July to October 2026, 97 commits: 9 pages, 2 lead tools, schema and AI-crawler SEO. Beta tests on real publications reshaped the scoring bands, because a band nearly everyone lands in stops being a diagnosis.
The look: an A-frame mark on Oxblood and Cream (Bordeaux, Dusty Rose, Soft Clay, Almond and Espresso), two fonts only (Editorial New and Spectral), and one signature move, a single italic word in a calm headline. It echoes Home Abroad's world as a room in the same house, with its own materials.
Around the site I kept a launch runbook (a checklist taken from the how-to guidelines), the landing-page email copies, an SEO backend, Google Analytics tracking and a log of website updates.
Still on the list when I left: a case-study section with before-and-after builds for each client, clearer compare pages, a tutorial video for the Scorecard, and a referral idea for it.
We wrote and reviewed the copy together.