Doc · Website
THNDR Studio
Website and backend for THNDR, an award-winning Amsterdam sonic branding studio. A bold, brutalist design backed by a custom CMS so the team can publish their work and stories themselves.
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Spec · 001
Project info
Year
2026
Category
Website
Brief · 002
About this project
THNDR is the Amsterdam sonic branding studio I help run: an award-winning team that creates sonic identities, composes original scores and designs sound for brands that refuse to sound like everyone else. The website had to feel as bold and crafted as the work, so I built it as a brutalist, typography-first showcase.
Behind it sits a custom CMS, so the team can publish their cases and stories themselves without ever touching a developer. Design, build and backend, all in house.
Inside the backend
The public site is only the surface. Behind it runs a custom studio platform I designed and built for THNDR, with AI woven into the daily workflow. A few of the more interesting parts:
AI newsletter generation
Pick a few projects and the platform writes the newsletter: a catchy title and a tight summary per project, plus the subject line, intro and closing. The tone even adapts to the season. Sending runs as a throttled, cancellable batch at 500 emails per hour, with live progress and a one-click killswitch.
YouTube poster and thumbnail studio
Turns a project's hero or behind-the-scenes video into a finished YouTube upload. AI writes the title, description and tags, matched to the channel's own voice by learning from its ten latest uploads, and proposes ten thumbnail text options. The 1280x720 thumbnail is composited in-app with ImageMagick and ffmpeg, with a gradient, a safe zone for the duration badge and the logo, then queued straight to the channel.
Deep analytics
Every project and video has its own engagement stats: plays, unique visitors and a live activity feed, with logged-in users excluded so the numbers stay clean. When someone watches a hero video, a real-time Telegram alert fires. Visitor geography even feeds which subtitle languages to prioritise.
AI social posts
Pick a project, choose Instagram or LinkedIn, and the platform writes platform-tailored copy and hashtags from the full project context: brief, challenge, output and credits. The length is tunable, you can steer it with an extra instruction, and the matching hero video downloads ready to post.