Context
The Alchemedia Project needed a marketing site covering agency messaging, team information, and case studies. As an internal project, it presented a low-risk opportunity to try a headless CMS approach for the first time. We took on the experimentation risk ourselves rather than on a client's time and budget.
Role
Process
- 01
Choosing headless as a learning opportunity
Internal projects are a good time to experiment with new ways of working. Prismic was a deliberate choice to get hands-on experience with a headless CMS that was designed for content editing in a real production context. The content modeling and API-driven approach were new territory, and working through it on an internal project meant the learning curve didn't come at anyone else's expense.
- 02
The manual data fetching problem
One of the less glamorous realities of working with Prismic at the time was the amount of manual data fetching required, every content type needed its own fetch logic, which added up to a lot of repetitive, but not quite identical code. It was a real friction point, and one that modern AI tooling would make trivial today. It didn't block the project, but it shaped an appreciation for the value of good SDK abstractions.
- 03
CSS techniques pushed by the design
Ryan's designs called for visual techniques that were outside my existing toolkit at the time: text-strokes, rotated type, SVG masks, and image masks. Implementing them required digging into CSS capabilities I didn't know existed. That kind of designer-led technical stretch is one of the better ways to expand what you know.
Visuals
Outcome
The site launched successfully and served The Alchemedia Project until the agency was absorbed into another company. It's no longer live, but it achieved its goals as both a functioning agency website and a genuine learning exercise.