Wildlife photographer in the Algarve. A limited-edition book about Africa became a website with integrated e-commerce, built from the book’s own visual language.

Tessa came to me through a referral. She’s a wildlife photographer who’s spent decades travelling across Africa’s national parks. South African by birth, she’d lived in Paris working in media and fashion magazines before moving to the Algarve in 2014. Photography had been her passion for years. The book was the first time she was putting it all together.

Passionately Africa was almost ready to print. A limited edition, with part of the proceeds going to Conservation Lower Zambezi. She already had a website on Squarespace, a clean template with a photo gallery and a small blog. It worked, but it didn’t look like the book. And it couldn’t sell it.

The brief was clear from the start: a site that matched the book’s visual identity, with e-commerce built in. Not a redesign for the sake of it. A new platform built around a specific object.

I got the book proofs as a PDF. The palette, the typography, the generous spacing, the way the photographs filled every page. That became the design language for the site. Large images, minimal text, plenty of breathing room. The web version of what the book already was.

The e-commerce was my first Stripe integration. Checkout, webhooks, order confirmation emails. One product, limited edition, shipping to multiple countries. It had to be simple enough for Tessa to manage without touching code.

The blog from the old Squarespace site was migrated manually into Sanity CMS, story by story. Content she’d written over the years about her travels and the animals she’d photographed.

Two meetings at Tessa’s home. One to understand the project. One to show her the result. She loved it. A few small adjustments, and it was live.