Mike Will Made It

The brief

A site that holds up next to the work.

Mike Will Made It is one of the defining producers of the last decade — Beast Mode, Black Beatles, Bad and Boujee. The catalog is extraordinary. The existing web presence was not.

The brief: build an official site that acts as a living catalog of placements, a contact router for sync and feature requests, and a brand that earns its place next to names like Future, Kendrick, and Swae Lee. Performance was non-negotiable — the previous site loaded in 8 seconds on mobile.

The approach

A bespoke design system built around the catalog, not around conventions.

Most artist sites default to a dark mood board with a hero image and a contact email. We built a site where the catalog is the experience — sortable by artist, year, genre, and placement type. The visual language borrows from music production software: precise, monochromatic, with accent color used as signal, not decoration.

Performance was treated as a design constraint from day one, not an optimization pass at the end. Images entered the pipeline as full-resolution assets and were processed through a Vercel-hosted transformation pipeline that serves appropriately sized WebP and AVIF variants based on device. First contentful paint on mobile stayed under 800ms throughout development.

What we learned

Headless CMS choice determines how often the client actually uses it.

Sanity was chosen specifically because its Studio interface is approachable enough for a non-technical team to manage catalog updates without involving a developer. The content model — placements, artist relationships, tags, date ranges — maps cleanly to Sanity's document model with minimal custom field types.

The biggest time investment was the content migration. Several hundred placements, each with correct metadata, artist relationships, and media assets. Building a solid import script at the start of the engagement saved weeks of manual data entry at the end.

Result

98 Lighthouse score. Three weeks start to finish.

Brief to live domain in 21 days. Lighthouse performance score of 98 on desktop and mobile. Sub-second LCP across all device categories tested. The catalog launched with 340+ placements, fully categorized and searchable.

The site is live at mikewillmadeit.com.

Stack

Technologies used