This page now lives on AX Products, our separate site for products and client work. This copy stays here so existing links keep working.
Strange Forms
Drawn to look stitched. Built so nothing is made up.
Strange Forms is our own brand of patterned sherpa fleece blankets, and the publishing system we built to sell them. Each pattern is drawn by hand, mark by mark, to look like embroidery, then printed. The site presents each design and links straight to its page in the shop.
- Type
- Product brand and static website
- Products
- Three blanket designs: Jungle, Japanica, Shogo
- Sales
- Through the Strange Forms shop on Printify; the site has no cart of its own
- Content
- Markdown with strictly validated frontmatter
- Media
- Prepared locally, served from Cloudflare R2
- Hosting
- Cloudflare Pages, deployed from GitHub after CI
- Status
- Live. Three designs available to order
01Story
Story
The problem
Small product sites drift. Prices go stale, placeholder text reaches production, and structured data claims things the page doesn’t show. For print-on-demand products, where the shop holds the real details, that drift is easy and costly.
What we built
We built a small static publishing system with strict rules. Content lives in validated Markdown, and the build refuses to invent anything: no price unless it is verified, no buy button without a real shop link, no draft in production. Every build is audited before it ships.
Why it is interesting
Search and AI-discovery choices are documented by the strength of their evidence, from established practice to untested hypothesis. Nothing is presented as an optimisation unless it also helps a person reading the page.
Who it helps
People buying a distinctive blanket, and, behind the scenes, anyone who needs a small product site that stays accurate.
02Key decisions
The decisions behind it
No cart of its own
Each design links straight to its page in the Strange Forms shop on Printify. The site has no checkout, accounts, backend or tracking.
Absent means unknown
Content fields are strictly validated. A missing fact stays unknown and is never filled in; a misspelled field is a build error.
Verified facts switch features on
A price appears only once it is verified against the shop, and a buy button only with a valid shop link. Otherwise the design says it isn’t available to order yet.
Facts separate from presentation
A product’s facts (name, shop link, price, images) are kept apart from how the site presents it, so either can change without the other.
A core for more than one site
Strange Forms is the first site on a shared publishing core. The core’s tests run against a separate fixture site, not Strange Forms.
03How it works
How it works
Write
Each design’s facts and copy live in a Markdown file with strictly validated frontmatter. A misspelled field is a build error, not a silent gap.
Prepare images
Photos are resized, compressed and named by content hash on a Mac, then uploaded to Cloudflare R2 in a separate, deliberate step.
Build
The build refuses to invent: no price unless it is marked verified, no buy button without a valid shop link, and no drafts in production.
Audit
Every pull request is tested, built, audited and HTML-validated in GitHub Actions, including a check that structured data matches the visible page.
Deploy
Merging to the main branch deploys the site through Cloudflare Pages.
04What it does
What it does
Hand-drawn patterns
Each design is built from thousands of small drawn marks that imitate thread, then printed on plush sherpa fleece.
Unknown stays unknown
Missing facts are never filled in. A price appears only once it is marked verified; a design without a shop link says it isn’t available yet.
Structured data that matches the page
JSON-LD for the organisation and products, checked by the build against the visible content.
Images handled once
Photos are resized and hashed locally, stored in Cloudflare R2, and cached for a year. The host never processes them.
Audited builds
Every pull request is built, audited and HTML-validated in GitHub Actions before Cloudflare Pages deploys it.
Ready for more sites
Strange Forms is the first site on a shared core. A new product site is configuration, content and its own presentation.
05How it was made
Testing and iteration
Choices recorded with their evidence
Search and AI-discovery choices are documented by the strength of their evidence, from established practice to untested hypothesis.
Iterated after launch
The system grew from one site into a shared core, and the separate product pages were removed; their old addresses redirect to the home page.
06In detail
In detail
07Outcome and limits
What is measured, and what it doesn’t do yet
Outcome No usage or outcome figures have been measured or published yet.
- Prices aren’t shown on the site yet. They will be once each one is confirmed against the shop.
- The site still runs on its pages.dev address; a custom domain is on the launch list.
Next step
Need something like this?
Strange Forms is an example of AX Designers’ digital visibility work. Businesses whose website should explain clearly what they do, to people, search engines and AI assistants alike, and who want changes grounded in evidence rather than tricks.
Start here
Have something worth building?
Tell us what you’re trying to improve, build or figure out. We’ll help you work out what makes sense.
or write to axdesigners.pl@gmail.com · What to include