IMG
Licensing
Technical direction and hands‑on development for IMG Licensing's digital platform, from its original media‑led rebuild through years of continuous evolution, major platform migrations, and a comprehensive redesign.
In Detail
When I first became involved with IMG Licensing in 2020, its existing website had been in place for several years and no longer reflected the business or the new identity being developed around it. IMG described the site as slow, clunky, dated, and difficult to manage. At the same time, the business had an enormous archive of high‑quality brand imagery and video that its existing digital presence simply could not exploit.
The original rebuild therefore had two priorities: create a much faster, more engaging experience around that media, and give IMG's team direct control over a site that needed to represent a large and frequently changing portfolio of brands. I built the new platform with React and Gatsby, using Contentful as its headless CMS, GraphQL for content integration, and FlexSearch to provide fast sitewide search with additional controls for curating relevant results. Following hands‑on training with IMG's team, the new website launched in June 2021.
That launch became the beginning of a much longer technical relationship rather than the end of the project. I continued working directly with IMG as the platform grew, adding new sections and functionality and adapting the product around changing business requirements and editorial needs. Traffic increased substantially after the original launch, whilst enquiries through the new contact journey increased several times over.
As both IMG's requirements and the surrounding technology landscape evolved, I subsequently reworked the foundations of the platform without discarding the product that had been built on top of them. The application was migrated from Gatsby to Next.js and its deployment moved from Netlify to Vercel, preserving the established content, functionality, URLs, and user experience whilst giving the platform a more appropriate foundation for its next stage of development.
As the business requirements continued to evolve and the website grew, the content estate and editorial workflow were later migrated from Contentful to Sanity, again retaining the value accumulated within the existing platform rather than treating migration as an excuse to start again.
Most recently, the same principle has shaped a comprehensive redesign of the public experience. Rather than replacing the platform developed over the preceding years, I rebuilt its presentation around IMG's updated visual direction whilst retaining and adapting the underlying content, functionality, and interaction patterns that continued to work. The result is not a succession of disconnected website builds, but the continued evolution of the same digital product through multiple generations of design, technology, and changing business needs.
Transforming IMG's Digital Presence
The original rebuild replaced a long‑standing website with a much faster, more visual experience designed around IMG's extensive portfolio of brands. Rich imagery and motion became central to the presentation, whilst the new content model gave IMG's team direct control over a site they could manage and evolve themselves.
Rebuilding the Experience
Motion was integral to the 2021 experience rebuild, helping to make full use of IMG's vast library of client imagery and video and creating a more engaging, immersive experience around that portfolio. Animated transitions, carousels, navigation, filtering, and other interactions brought that content to life and gave visitors a more dynamic way to explore the breadth of brands IMG represents.
Built Around IMG's Brand Portfolio
With over 200 clients to showcase, the client listing needed to make a large and varied portfolio straightforward to browse and explore. Categorised panels could be navigated by keyboard, mouse, or touch, with filtering and search helping visitors find individual brands. From there, dedicated brand pages gave IMG the flexibility to use as much imagery, video, background information, and licensing work as each client required.
Sitewide Search
With such a broad portfolio and growing body of editorial content, search was designed as more than simple keyword matching. I used FlexSearch to index content across the site and provide immediate, categorised search results. I extended this with associative terms, allowing IMG to curate results for related brands, articles, and categories even where the visitor's search did not produce an exact match.
Continuing to Evolve
The launch of the new website in 2021 marked the start of an ongoing relationship with IMG, with the platform continuing to grow as new requirements emerged. One of the larger additions was a dedicated Case Studies section, giving IMG a new way to showcase its licensing work through a filterable, content‑managed collection of projects, with promotional panels and individual case studies presented within the experience.
Replatforming to Next.js
By early 2026, as Gatsby's ecosystem and active development had declined, keeping the platform maintained, current, and secure was becoming increasingly difficult. Rather than allowing that technical debt to accumulate around an otherwise successful product, I migrated the application from Gatsby to Next.js and moved its deployment from Netlify to Vercel. The migration preserved the existing content, URLs, functionality, and user experience, replacing the technical foundations without unnecessarily rebuilding the product that had evolved on top of them.
Moving from Contentful to Sanity
As IMG's content estate continued to grow, the platform eventually outgrew the Contentful plan that it had launched with, whilst moving to its paid offering would have introduced a significant ongoing cost for no perceived additional benefit. I therefore migrated the complete content estate and editorial workflow to Sanity, introducing a cleaner editing model at a much lower ongoing cost for IMG. The migration launched without downtime or data loss, and without any measurable change in SEO performance.
Optimising Image Delivery
As the Sanity implementation matured, I introduced a dedicated image processing and caching layer, storing source assets and derived metadata such as blur placeholders and dominant colours in Vercel Blob. This avoids repeatedly retrieving and processing the same assets from Sanity, whilst allowing optimised images to be served and cached through Next.js and Vercel's edge infrastructure. Image loading became noticeably faster across the media‑heavy site, whilst Sanity client bandwidth fell from nearly 100 GB per month to approximately 4 GB, with no material impact on build times.
Evolving the Design
Following wider changes within IMG, the business introduced a new visual identity, including an updated logo and a comprehensive new design for the website. Working from those designs, I redeveloped the front end to introduce the new look and feel whilst retaining the platform, content, functionality, and interaction patterns built up over the preceding years. The result is a substantial visual transformation without unnecessarily rebuilding the product underneath it.
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John Kavanagh is one of the most open‑minded developers I have ever worked with. His appreciation of great creative work, his enthusiasm and 'anything is possible' attitude is always a breath of fresh air. I worked with him on several successful projects in our days at McCann Worldgroup. Since then we have collaborated on many freelance projects and he's always been super efficient and effective, combining a great work ethic with immense talent. If I ever have a creative digital project which needed bringing to life, John is the first developer I call on."
