Chasing Waves, Building Legends
Balance, grit, and fearless focus. For young surfers like these, every wave is a lesson in control and courage. Dive into their routines, recovery hacks, and the mindset that keeps them sharp-on and off the board.
Editorial Systems · Visual Design · Built
Beyond the Score
A sports publication built for everything that isn't the result — and structured to hold a lot of it at once.
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01 — Idea
Sport is more than results.
Scores are a solved problem. Every app, broadcaster, and notification already delivers them faster than a publication can. What's underserved is the rest of it — the rivalries, the routines, the people, the culture that makes any of the results matter. Sportive is built for the reader who already knows the score and wants to know why anyone cares.
02 — Editorial System
Making density feel editorial.
The instinct with a busy homepage is to remove things. That was the wrong lever here — the problem was never the amount of content, it was that everything looked equally important. Instead of subtracting, I built four story shapes with fixed rules for each, so every element announces what kind of thing it is before a word gets read. The page holds more than the earlier version and scans faster.
Feature headline
Built different: the rise of Jaxon Ruiz
Story title
Inside the Mind of a Champion
Brief
A closer look at endurance, mindset, and performance.
Metadata
Cycling · 6 min read · May 2025
01 / Hero story — One per view. The reason to stop scrolling.
Feature · Cycling
Built Different: The Rise of Jaxon Ruiz
Step into the minds of elite athletes - their beginnings, their breakthroughs, and the moments that shaped their paths.
02 / Feature — Repeatable. Carries the bulk of the page.
Built Different: The Rise of Jaxon Ruiz
Step into the minds of elite athletes - their beginnings, their breakthroughs, and the moments that shaped their paths.
03 / Related — Compact, text-forward, built for the end of an article.
Built Different: The Rise of Jaxon Ruiz
Step into the minds of elite athletes - their beginnings, their breakthroughs, and the moments that shaped their paths.
Read more →Colors
CYAN
Editorial framing
WARM WHITE
Reading surface
BLACK
Immersive features
ACID YELLOW
Emphasis
03 — Discovery
Stories designed to be discovered.
Six sports, four formats, and stories ranging from a two-minute read to a long profile — all of it needing to live in one structure without a bespoke template each time. The system had to be loose enough to fit a surf feature and a cycling interview, and rigid enough that neither one requires a designer to publish.
04 — Experience
From one story to the next.
The easy version of this is an infinite feed, which maximises time on site and produces no sense of having read anything. Sportive ends stories deliberately, then offers a small number of specific next reads rather than an endless stream. Fewer options, chosen rather than generated — closer to how a magazine hands you along than how a feed holds you.
05 — Reflection
Density still needs room to breathe.
Building it in Webflow rather than handing it off changed the design. Several layouts I liked turned out to be fragile against real content — a headline two words longer, an image with a different crop — and I found that out by publishing rather than by review. What shipped is more tolerant than what I designed, and it's better for it.