Basanto Studio × Térence Mbu

Basanto Studio is a French-Mexican creative studio working between Mexico City and Paris. They do creative direction, photo and film campaigns, ongoing content and event coverage. 3 partners, 2 cultures, and one line that sums up how they sell: the image is the result, the thinking is the work.

Their work lived on Instagram. Instagram is where you get discovered, not where you get chosen. A brand about to hand over a campaign wants to see a body of work and understand how the studio operates. It is not going to piece that together by scrolling back through a profile.

The second point goes to the studio's own craft. On Instagram, the platform decides the frame and what gets cut. A studio whose craft is framing was letting someone else reframe its work.

So they needed a site that presents the work as one coherent body, in the 2 languages of their 2 markets. And one the team could feed themselves between 2 shoots, without going back through a developer.

4 stages, from framing to handing over the accounts.

We came to Térence to build our studio's website. Once we had walked him through what we needed, he adapted to it and brought ideas of his own to get to the best possible result. Our site is easy to use and fast. Térence was responsive and a good listener. We happily recommend his work.

Baptiste Soulé, co-founder, Basanto Studio

That is the real difficulty of a creative studio's site. A page is composed around 3 chosen photographs. The site will receive 300, in shapes nobody knows yet, added by someone else.

The usual reflex is to drop each image into a fixed-shape frame and trim whatever sticks out. It produces a flawless grid. It also amounts to publishing your own crop on the client's work: a vertical portrait squeezed into a horizontal slot loses the head and the feet. That is exactly what the studio was leaving behind when it left Instagram. Here, every photograph keeps the proportions it was framed in.

Then there is rhythm. An even grid produces a contact sheet, where everything is equal and nothing gets looked at. So the studio has a per-image setting to push one photograph full width. It is the one control that turns a generated page into a composed one, and it belongs to them.

Everything else sits in a system. Colours, sizes, spacing, margin rhythm: each value is decided once and becomes the site's only source. No component carries a hand-written value. A correction happens in one place and applies everywhere, today as on the day the identity evolves.

The site runs on Sanity, a content manager you build to measure rather than adapt. That is what makes it possible to hand over something other than a generic dashboard the client has to translate for themselves.

The team already files its deliveries in 3 folders: photos only, photos and videos, videos only. The back office uses those same 3 folders, with the same names. Creating a project from the right folder pre-fills the format and hides the fields that do not apply: a photo project will never ask for a video link. A project that gets its film 6 months later moves folder in one click, losing nothing.

Every field carries its explanation under its label, in the studio's vocabulary rather than a developer's. Nobody ever has to guess what a field expects.

Handover did not stop at delivery. The team was trained on video, on its own content, and has a written guide in French it can reopen months later. Since then they add their projects, their photographs, their films and both languages themselves, from any time zone.

Spanish was asked for later. The structure was laid on day one. A bilingual site cannot be added afterwards without rewriting everything: it is the kind of decision that costs nothing at the start and a rebuild 6 months in.

The site is fully translated, 375 lines of text per language. Each version points to the other through a real link a search engine can follow. That is the difference between a bilingual site and a site with a language switcher.

The rest sits in details a visitor only notices when they are missing. Switching language does not reset the filter they were reading through. A project keeps the same address in both versions. And the Spanish version is declared Mexican rather than Spanish, because the studio and its clients are.

basantostudio.com/es

4 pages out of 5 score 100 on performance. The homepage, the heaviest page on the site, is at 95. Accessibility, best practices and technical SEO are at 100. These figures are taken on the live site: anyone can run them again.

This is not an end-of-project tweak. A studio's photographs weigh several megabytes each. Sent as they are, they leave the visitor in front of a blank page and eat into the data plan of anyone looking on a phone. So the site receives the files at full resolution and builds lighter versions itself, in formats recent browsers decode better. Each screen gets the one that matches it. The studio has nothing to compress before sending.

Same logic on the films: nothing loads until the visitor clicks.

On accessibility, 8 greys were raised to the contrast thresholds of the WCAG 2.1 AA standard, without touching the visual direction. Image descriptions are required in the back office, in both languages. On a site whose subject is the image, describing what you show is not optional.

You run a studio, a brand or a creative company. You want a site that shows your work the way you framed it, and that your team keeps alive without going back through a developer. Write to me. Basanto's is live: www.basantostudio.com.