Two people,
four beats
We are a web studio in Bucharest. We write markup and front-end code and we build design systems, and we named the studio after the one part of a screen that keeps working after everything has moved on.
Charge
Something has to hit the phosphor before it glows. A project starts the same way: we spend the first week reading what you already have. The old site, the printed matter, the words your customers actually use on the phone. We charge the page with those, not with our own taste.
Hold
A charged screen holds its picture for a moment. We draw the whole page before we build any of it, and we show you the parts that are not finished instead of hiding them behind a blurred mockup. The layout has to hold at 1440 pixels, at 1680, and at 390 on a phone in one hand.
Decay
After launch the site decays. Traffic falls, the news goes stale, the third product changes its name. We write down what will need attention and roughly when, so the second year costs less than the first. Decay is not a fault. A screen that never decays is a screen nobody built.
Quench
Nickel is added to a phosphor to shorten its afterglow, and the glow is quenched. Projects get quenched too: a scope cut in the last week, a colour changed after the design was signed off, a page that was never built. When that happens we say so, and we say what it cost.
The type, on itself
Three faces, each doing one job and nothing else. They are set here at the sizes the site actually uses them.
The body face is the one you read for a long time, so it is the plainest of the three. Anything set in it is meant to be read rather than looked at.
DECAY 1.4s · PEAK 455nm · WIDTH 45nm
What we build with, and why
Hand-written HTML and CSS, plain JavaScript, Vite to bundle it, GSAP for motion and Lenis for smooth scrolling. Nothing here is exotic. We choose tools that will still be maintained in five years, because a site that cannot be rebuilt in five years is not finished.
Every page on this site is a real file. The ribbon is drawn on a 2D canvas from one engine, reused on the hero, on this page and on the 404 page, and paused whenever it is off screen. When it runs slowly it does so on an old laptop, and we would rather it ran at a lower rate than that we drew less of it.
Writing and reading has always come with this colonial layer, even when we are reading local languages typeset using roman characters.
Nontsikelelo Mutiti, on typography. Every typeface carries history with it, including ours, and saying so is cheaper than pretending otherwise.
The two of us
Design
Layout, type, colour systems and the drawing of the pages. Two weeks of the first four are spent on paper and in the browser at the same time, because a layout that only works in a drawing is not a layout.
Build
Markup, front-end code, accessibility and the parts that have to keep working: forms, the checkout, the CMS the office staff actually use. We both do both, which is why we take on about six projects a year.
One studio, two people, no account managers. If the answer to your question is no, you will hear it from the person who would have done the work.