The shop is not the point.
A maker who sells eleven times a year, in person, at guitar shows. Every instinct says build a shop. The brief said build a tour poster.
Invented business · nobody paid for this
Marrowbone Guitars does not exist. The name, the people, the prices and the phone numbers are all fictional, with the numbers taken from the ranges Ofcom reserves for drama. The rest of this journal is notes on real, paid work — this one is a speculative build, and it is labelled that way so the two are never mistaken for each other. The design problem underneath it is real, and so is the finished, working site.
Handbuilt guitars · East Yorkshire
The premise: one man, a workshop, three- and four-string guitars built out of charred pine and cigar boxes. Twenty or so a year, no two the same. He sells them at guitar shows — eleven of them, spread across the country, from February to November.
The obvious build is a small shop. Product grid, filters, basket, done. It would be quick and it would be wrong, and the reason it is wrong is the most useful thing on this page.
A grid is a promise you cannot keep
A product grid tells the visitor something specific: there are more where that came from. Every convention in it — the filters, the sort order, the neat repeating cards — exists to help you narrow down a range. It is the right tool when you have forty of a thing in eight colours.
This maker has one of each. Put a one-off in a grid and the grid quietly demotes it into a variant. Worse, when the good ones sell, the grid goes thin, and a thin grid reads as a business in trouble rather than a maker who is simply sold out.
Scarcity is the product. A layout that treats it as a stock problem is arguing with the business.
So each guitar gets its own slot with its own specification block — wood, strings, pickup, fret count, lead time — framed like a polaroid taped to the page. Sold ones stay up with the stamp across them. The sold stock is not an embarrassment to be hidden; it is the evidence that the work is wanted.
The schedule outranks the shop
The real conversion event for this business is not a card payment. It is somebody standing in a hall in Wirral with a guitar in their hands. Nobody spends four hundred pounds on an instrument with an unfamiliar neck profile without holding it first, and the maker knows it — it is why he does eleven shows a year instead of one good listing.
That makes the tour schedule the primary call to action, sitting above the guitars rather than buried under a Contact tab. Eleven dated rows, venue and stage, the way a gig list works. The site's job is to get somebody to turn up.
Why it looks like a handbill
Once the tour is the spine, the visual language writes itself. This is a poster: a scrolling ticker across the top, double-rule borders, a wordmark stacked three colours deep in Alfa Slab One, dates set like a bill posted outside a venue.
It is also a deliberate refusal. The default for a craft business is white space, thin sans-serif and a lot of tasteful photography — a look that says premium and says nothing else, because every competitor is using it. Charred wood and shotgun-shell pickups are not tasteful. Making the site tasteful would have been a failure of nerve.
The type does the work photography usually does. That matters for a small maker, because it means the site holds up on the days when the only available picture is one taken on a phone in a badly lit workshop.