Brand and multi-site platform for Chris Howard's food-creator network. Every episode Chris ships now lands on the page with the recipe broken out, the transcript ready, the guest credited, and the structural work already done — so the time he used to spend assembling a post goes to making the next one.
A YouTube channel that worked — guest-driven, one-cook-one-sandwich episodes, real recipes, a loyal sub base. And a website that didn't keep up: every post a paragraph block, no structure, no transcript, no way to surface a single ingredient or guest across the archive. Posting a new episode took most of an afternoon. The site looked like every other food blog because, structurally, it was every other food blog.
The brief wasn't "redesign the website." It was: build the publishing house under the show — the multi-site network, the editorial layer, the desk Chris should have been working on for years.
The brand register shifted as the show found its shape. The early mustard-on-paper direction was right for a food magazine; the show is a film about a sandwich. The shipped system holds a near-black ground for the photography to breathe against and a single warm-amber glow on the wordmark that reads like a kitchen at golden hour.
Near-black warm ground for the cinema feel, cream for body, a single amber glow that wraps the wordmark and fires on every CTA. Photography brings its own color — palette stays out of its way.
A heavy display sans for the wordmark and episode titles. Hanken Grotesk for body. JetBrains Mono for system labels and component-recipe lines. Photography is the typography's partner — every glyph is sized to hold its own against a hero shot.
If the photography doesn't have grease or crumbs visible, it wasn't shot well enough. The site is for cooks. Pristine food photography lies; the show doesn't.
Per-episode pages with the recipe broken out by component, the guest credited and linked, the transcript available, a clean embedded player that preserves Chris's subscriber conversion. The page works the way a cook reads.
Chris pushes a new episode in minutes, not afternoons. Every field, every section, every credit — under his control, on his timeline. The studio is gone the moment the system ships; Chris is the editor.
Sandwich Show was first; Three Blind Wines came up on the same publishing layer. Every future show Chris launches uses the same desk — and inherits everything the first two earned.
A gallery of hero artwork rendered on owned compute and refined by hand. Chris doesn't pay stock-photo subscriptions and his shows don't look like every other food channel's thumbnails.
Chris's prior archive — Lanyap Cookery — was migrated piece by piece into the new system. Nothing was lost. Every article gets a richer home.
Per-show newsletter lists, the sender account, the integration into the publishing flow. When Chris publishes an episode, the subscriber email writes itself off the same record.
When Chris uploads a video, the system does the part Chris was never going to enjoy — pulling the transcript, parsing the guest and venue, structuring the recipe, marking up the schema. By the time Chris sits down at the desk, the structural work is done and the only thing left is the part that's actually his: the writing, the editing, the editorial judgment about which episodes get pushed and how.
Not "AI writes the blog." Chris's voice is the spec the system is held to; anything that doesn't read like Chris doesn't get to him in the first place, and anything that doesn't read like Chris doesn't ship. The model is held to Chris's archive, not the other way around — and Chris is on every published post.
What it is: the assistant Chris would hire if he could afford one, sitting in the room at the moment of upload, doing the work that's beneath the job.
| Layer | State |
|---|---|
| Sandwich Show site + publishing system + editorial assistant | running |
| Three Blind Wines · second show on the network | live |
| 34 authored hero images · per-show design review | shipped |
| Lanyap Cookery archive — 93 articles migrated and live | published |
| Production deploy on Chris's account | live |
| Merch + print-on-demand storefront | selling |
| Per-show newsletter lists | sending |
| Umbrella CH Media hub site | live |
Every video used to just sit there on a default WordPress page. Now there's actually a site under it. I sit down to write the post and the structural work is already done — I can spend the time on the part that's actually mine.
Chris Howard · Creator, Another Sandwich Show · CH Media
