House of Places · Shopify store build

Turning a design prototype into a live Shopify store

A Shopify store for travel-poster prints that sells to the US, built from a finished design: a world-map explorer, quick add on every product card and a print, framed print or canvas choice on each poster.

9prototype pages carried into the theme

3formats on a poster page: print, framed print, canvas

Dawn 16theme base, extended with custom sections

Problem

The owner arrived with a finished design, one large HTML prototype covering nine pages, and no store. A prototype is not a shop: its colours and type sizes drift from page to page, and none of it knows about carts, variants or checkout.

Constraint

The result had to stay faithful to the design while living inside Shopify's own theme system, so the owner can keep adding posters and pages without a developer. The store sells to the US only, so every promise on the page had to match what the shop's shipping and checkout actually do.

Approach

I started from Shopify's Dawn theme and ported the prototype page by page, moving its loose colours and sizes onto theme colour schemes and one type scale. Custom sections cover what Dawn does not: a world map for exploring posters by country, a city ticker, a feature bar, a studio-list sign-up and quick add on product cards. The product page switches between print, framed print and canvas. After hand-over an independent audit compared each storefront promise with the shop's real settings, such as the shipping region and the offers, and the copy was corrected wherever they disagreed.

Result

The store is live and open to the public. Browsing by place, quick add and the format choice work on desktop and on a 390 px phone, and the owner manages products and pages in the normal Shopify admin.

houseofplacesprints.com (opens in a new tab)

The store, screen by screen

Captured from the live store: desktop at 1440 px, phone at 390 px.

Home
Explore posters on a map
The home page opens on a world map. A visitor clicks a country, or searches a city, and lands on that place's posters. A city ticker and a studio-list sign-up sit around it.
Collection
Browse by place, add in one tap
Each country has its own collection. A side list and a city search move between places, and every card has quick add, so a visitor can fill a cart without opening each poster.
- Search by city and a browse-places list
- Quick add on every product card
- Wishlist heart on each card
Product
One poster, three formats
The product page switches between print, framed print and canvas, with sizes and the price updating as the choice changes. Add to cart and Buy it now sit above the fold on desktop.
Mobile
The same store on a phone
The layout is rebuilt for a 390 px screen, not shrunk: a menu, a full-width map, two-column collections with quick add and a swipeable product gallery.