There's a particular letdown that happens between a design and the live website. The direction was good. The mockups were good. What launched has the same layout with all the life taken out. The movement is gone or stutters. The fonts aren't quite right. The details that made it special have been smoothed into whatever stock parts the developer already had.
This work exists to close that gap. It's for teams who already know what they want to make and need someone who can actually build it, properly, without talking the idea down to whatever's easiest.
We start from the view that movement and interaction are part of the design, not effects added on top. A scrolling sequence, a transition, what happens when you hover, the way text appears: each one either means something or it's decoration. Decoration is the first thing we cut when it slows the site down. So we ask the hard questions early. What is this movement for? What does it do on a slow phone? What happens when someone has asked their device for less motion? What does the page look like if the script never loads?
That last question matters more than it sounds. A lot of impressive web work is one failed download away from a blank page. Everything we build still works when things go wrong. The content is ready before any scripts run. The movement is an extra on top of a page that already works. And the reduced-motion version is a real alternative, not a switch that breaks the site.
What you get is finished code your team can own. Not a prototype someone else has to rebuild, and not a black box that only works if nobody touches it.
Who it’s for
Brands with a clear direction, and teams or agencies who need a builder who won't water the idea down.
The problem it solves
The idea exists. Your current vendor or team can't build it without losing what makes it special, or can't make it fast, accessible, and easy to maintain.
How we do it differently
We treat the interactive parts as part of the product, not a demo. Speed, accessibility, and a plan for when something can't run are built in from the first prototype.
What you get
- Your idea intact on the live site, at the quality it was designed at
- Movement that stays smooth (60 frames a second) on mid-range phones, not just on a desktop
- A real version for people who've turned on reduced motion, not a broken one
- Content that shows up even if JavaScript doesn't run, with the extras layered on top
- Code your own team can read, add to, and maintain
How it works
Reveal
We study the direction and sort out which parts carry the idea and which are just illustration. We name any technical limits early.
Reimagine
We prototype the hardest parts first (the interactions that carry the idea), so the risky work is sorted out before the easy pages get built.
Build
Finished code for the part of the site people see, built in your existing setup or ours. Speed limits and accessibility hold as the work grows, instead of being patched in later.
Refine
Testing on the devices that actually matter, checks with reduced motion and with JavaScript turned off, and a handover your team can pick up.
What’s usually included
- Movement and interaction design
- Prototypes you can put in front of real people
- Finished code for the part of the site people see
- Technical advice inside your existing setup
- Speed improvements
- Quality checks across devices and reduced-motion settings
What it costs
$5,500Typical starting point
This one varies the most of the four. It can be a single standout interaction, or a full build of someone else's design. We scope it by the number of hard parts, not by the number of pages.
What moves the number
- How many truly new interactions there are, compared with standard parts
- Whether we build in your existing setup or ours
- Whether the design is finished or still changing
- Which devices and browsers you need to support
- Whether your team takes over afterward, and how much handover that needs
Proof
Traveling Houston
A field guide to Houston that starts on the Moon.
No one hired us for this one. It's our own field guide to our own city. It starts inside Apollo 11's lunar module, where the first word of the message home was “Houston.” As you scroll, you fall all the way down into a 3D Houston built from open map data, and the camera flies to each of 140 checked places. It has its own radio of 158 original songs, a live sky, sixteen games and five languages.
Travel · City guide
Questions we get asked
We already have a designer. Can you just build it?
Yes, that's the usual setup for this work. We build from your direction, and our job is to protect it. Sometimes that means telling you a detail won't hold up on a real device, and suggesting something that keeps what you meant.
Can you work inside our existing codebase?
Usually. We'll want to read it first, and we'll tell you honestly whether it can do the job. Building on a setup that fights the idea gives you the same watered-down result this work is meant to avoid.
Does heavy motion make the site slow?
It can, and most of it does. Avoiding that is a design choice, not a cleanup at the end. It means animating the right things, keeping heavy effects from holding up the page, and only loading big files when they're needed. We set speed limits at the start and stick to them.
What about users who have motion sensitivity?
We treat reduced motion as a real version of the site, not a fallback. Background and scroll effects switch off, everything is still easy to read without them, and nothing important is shown only through movement.
Do we own the code?
Yes, all of it, and it's written to be handed over. There's no hidden layer only we understand, and you don't need us to make a change.