Studio Notes
Our first site was custom code inside a Webflow shell. It looked right and it could not be edited by anyone who was not us. Here is what we changed and why.
The first version of this site was honest about one thing and dishonest about another. It looked the way we wanted, down to the pixel, because every section was hand written code dropped into an embed. And it was, for practical purposes, uneditable. Changing a headline meant opening a code block, finding the line, and hoping nothing else moved. We would never hand a client a site like that. So we stopped accepting it for ourselves.
Every section is now built from native elements. Headings are headings. Text is text. The collection lists for work and writing are real collection lists bound to real fields, so adding a case study is a form, not a deployment. The nav and footer are components, edited once and updated everywhere.
The motion system lives in one small stylesheet and one script that reads data attributes. A section that should reveal on scroll is marked as such and the script does the rest. Nobody has to touch the animation code to add a section, which is the same discipline we ask of the brand: a small system, used everywhere.
The particle mark stayed, because the studio loves it and because it is the one animation on the site that could not be replaced by a simpler one without losing something. It assembles from scattered points as the page loads and drifts apart as you scroll. It is kinetic, and it is not noisy, which is the test we hold everything to.
The typography stayed. Fraunces for the headlines, one italic word per heading, Hanken Grotesk for the reading text and Montserrat for the small capital labels. The palette stayed: ink and bone and a handful of greys, with no accent colour, because restraint is the brand.
A site that only its builder can edit is not finished. It is a dependency dressed as a deliverable. The rebuild took longer than the original, mostly because it forced every design decision into a system that has to work without us present. That is the version of done we now hold every client project to: editable by the people who own it, responsive by structure rather than by patch, and animated only where the motion has a job.
If you are curious, the brand guide that governs all of this is public. It is short. That is deliberate too.
Bring this to your own site
If a note here names something your brand or website is quietly getting wrong, the scorecard will tell you how much it matters and what to fix first.
bring the question you are stuck on. we will tell you what we would do.