📝 Dead Rats NYC Part 2: Building a Streetwear Brand Website on Squarespace
🐀 Establishing the Foundation
When we decided to bring DeadRatsNYC back online, we knew this couldn’t just be another quick-and-dirty portfolio site. It needed bones, it needed style, and it needed to feel like it belonged on the same streets as the rats themselves.
Step one was locking a style guide. Fonts, spacing, and color decisions aren’t afterthoughts — they’re what gives the project its backbone. We landed on a mix that feels hand-scrawled but deliberate:
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✍️ Permanent Marker for loud headlines (the big shouts).
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🟥 Bungee for buttons and section titles (playful, blocky, a little carnival).
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📑 Space Grotesk for body text and UI (clean, modern contrast to the chaos).
Color-wise, we stuck to the gritty:
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⚫ Rat Black (#0B0B0C) for depth.
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🌚 Alley Grey (#1E1E22) for structure.
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💖 Neon Rat Pink (#FF2E88) as the shock accent.
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🚕 Taxi Stripe Yellow (#F7C948) to slice through the dark.
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🕊️ Concrete Off-White (#F2F1EC) as the balance.
With that palette and type locked, we defined spacing rules, grid rhythm, and texture so the whole site felt unified.
🗺️ Wireframing the “Need-Before-Go” Pages
Before dreaming of merch drops and wild interactive maps, we asked: what does DeadRatsNYC need to even stand on its feet?
Answer: two things.
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🏠 A homepage that hits instantly. Hero banner, sharp tagline, CTAs to dive deeper. This is the entry point — where a visitor decides if DeadRats is just another novelty account or something collectible, cultural, and worth exploring.
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🖼️ A gallery page. The real archive, where the story lives. Each rat sighting gets its spot — photo, title, date, borough. And crucially, every gallery tile is designed to eventually link out to its own page with a buy button. Not just an archive, but a storefront.
We sketched it all out before a single pixel hit the page.
🐀 Populating the Gallery
The gallery couldn’t sit empty, so we turned back to the original DeadRatsNYC photos — the raw sightings that started it all. To evolve them into products, we ran a series of AI-driven treatments:
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🎭 Simple filters to cartoonize or simplify.
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🖤 Advanced stylization — hatch prints, tattoo-flash poster looks, bold color palettes.
The effect is that one single rat sighting can spawn multiple collectible versions: raw photo, cartoon diptych, flash-poster print. Each variant adds depth to the gallery and builds toward the idea that every sighting is a piece of street-level pop art.
⏭️ What’s Next — Part 3
DeadRatsNYC isn’t stopping at a homepage and gallery. Part 3 will dive into the connective tissue: 📝 submissions, ⭐ ratings, 🗺️ maps, and maybe even 🛍️ merch drops. Each step grows the site from a static gallery into a living museum of NYC’s most infamous residents.
The rats are resurging. And this time, they’re for sale.
