Dreamers Zine

Dreamers Zine is a Bristol-based creative magazine covering culture, visual art, poetry, and short fiction. They needed more than a website. They needed a way to publish.

What they were after

The team wanted to run a proper online magazine. Articles with rich editorial layouts, not just text and a header image. Categories for different content types. Author profiles. A homepage they could curate. And critically, they needed to publish new content themselves without calling a developer every time.

This was a different kind of brief from my other projects. Stuart Carlisle and Riff Raff are small sites that rarely change. Dreamers Zine publishes regularly. The architecture had to support that.

What I built

The site runs on Astro with Sanity as the headless CMS. Content comes in via GROQ queries and renders through Portable Text, which is Sanity’s structured content format. The important bit is what sits on top of that.

I built 9 custom block types that the editorial team can drop into any article. Image galleries, text overlaid on photography, split-screen layouts, pull quotes over images, video embeds, callout boxes. Each one is a component in the codebase that Sanity knows about. When someone creates an article in Sanity Studio, they pick from these blocks and arrange them however the piece requires.

The result is that every article can have a different layout without anyone touching code. A photography essay uses image galleries and text-over-image blocks. An interview uses pull quotes and split screens. A poetry piece might just be text with a single full-bleed image. The same system handles all of it.

Articles are organised under Culture (interviews, reviews, essays) and Creative (visual art, short fiction, poetry). There’s a related articles engine that matches by category, author pages with bios, and a homepage with featured articles and a letter from the editor, all managed through Sanity.

The content management angle

This is the part that matters most for this project. The Dreamers team logs into Sanity Studio, writes their article, picks the blocks they want, uploads their images (which go through Sanity’s CDN with automatic optimisation), and publishes. The site rebuilds. No developer needed.

The commit history tells the story. Early commits are all mine, building the platform. Recent commits are content updates and small refinements. The system works the way it was designed to.

Where it landed

The site’s been live since mid-2025. The team publishes independently. The custom block system handles everything they’ve thrown at it so far. Built solo, working directly with the magazine’s team here in Bristol.

If you’re running a publication, a magazine, or any content-heavy site and you’re tired of fighting your platform to get layouts right, drop me an email.