Notes on the make.

Type is the loudest design choice on a digital studio site. We picked three families that work as a chord, not a competition: Syne for the headlines (architectural, slightly strange), Inter for the body (a workhorse, neutral), and JetBrains Mono for labels and metadata (so the editorial chrome reads as a system, not a flourish).

Next.js 16 (App Router, React Server Components, streaming metadata, Turbopack), React 19 with Activity + ViewTransition hooks, TypeScript everywhere. We treat upgrades as table stakes — running the latest stable surfaces breaking changes early and keeps the studio fluent in the framework we ship for clients.

Utilities for layout, CSS variables for tokens. Tailwind v4’s @theme directive keeps every brand colour, font and fluid-type clamp in one globals.css file — so when we redesign the system, every component picks it up without touching them.

Inline style={} is preferred for design-system tokens (so reviewers can grep for var(--accent)); utilities own the layout grid.

Different motion engines for different jobs. Lenis runs the base scroll loop with rAF integration. GSAP drives the heavier orchestration — pinned theatres, ScrollTrigger timelines, the page-transition curtain, our shared-element FLIP morph from project card to case-study hero. Framer Motion handles small local-state transitions where co-locating with React is more ergonomic than imperative tweening.

Every animation is gated behind prefers-reduced-motion. The system respects that signal in capture-phase, before any timeline starts.

Three.js for the WebGL effects (custom cursor field, particle void on the 404 page, ambient image distortions). React Three Fiber where the scene is component-shaped; raw Three where the shader needs imperative control. Everything WebGL is gated on tier detection — we never ship it to laptops that can’t run it cleanly at 60fps, and never to prefers-reduced-motion users.

The optional ambient drone you hear when you toggle sound on isn’t a file — it’s three oscillators layered at C2, G2, and C3, routed through a low-pass filter at 600 Hz with a slow LFO modulating the gain. No audio assets ship in the bundle.

Hover, click and transition cues are the same: short synthesized tones with envelopes shaped per event. Every sound respects the global mute state and prefers-reduced-motion.

Supabase Postgres for the database, Supabase Auth for client accounts. Every table is row-level-secured — no public reads of user data, no service-role keys in the client. The @supabase/ssr package handles cookie-based sessions in the App Router so the same query works in Server Components, Route Handlers and Server Actions.

Stripe Subscriptions for the three retainer tiers. Webhook handlers reconcile subscription state to Supabase, so the dashboard’s entitlement check never depends on a live API call. Customer portal handles upgrades, downgrades and cancellations without us building a billing UI.

Contact-form submissions, dashboard welcome emails, newsletter audience management — all via Resend. Stripe handles invoice emails directly so we don’t duplicate that path. No SMTP, no sub-Postmaster files to maintain, no SPF/DKIM copy-pasting.

Vercel hosting, GitHub for source. Each commit on main deploys automatically to production; preview deploys land on every branch and pull request. Build runs in parallel across 17 workers, generates 93+ static pages including OG images and sitemap, finishes in under three minutes.

Plausible for referrers and event tracking — no cookies, no cross-site identifiers, GDPR-clean by default. Vercel Analytics for deployment-aware page views (useful when comparing before/after a release). Vercel Speed Insights for real-user Core Web Vitals per route. Together they’re enough to make decisions; no individual visitor is ever tracked.

No design happens in a vacuum. The editorial micro-labels owe a debt to Frank Chimero and Naomi Atkinson; the cinematic transitions to studios like Resn, Locomotive and Ueno; the type-as-architecture instinct to Wim Crouwel and any classic Swiss spread you’ve ever seen.

On the engineering side: Lee Robinson and the Vercel docs are still the clearest writing on Next.js architecture. Josh Comeau’s posts shaped how we think about animation ergonomics. Andy Bell on layout primitives.

Standards are commitments, not check-marks. Every page passes WCAG AA contrast, has visible keyboard focus, respects prefers-reduced-motion, ships under a 2.5s LCP target on a mid-tier mobile, and renders without JavaScript for the marketing surfaces. The free /audit tool is the one we run on our own work first.

The repository is private — but if you’re curious about a specific pattern, ask. We’re happy to walk through the transition system, the OG generator, the audio engine, the Stripe / Supabase glue, or anything else by email or on a call.

For a live snapshot of what’s being worked on, see /now. For recent shipping notes, see /changelog.