About
We design and build websites for small teams. Reef Notes is where the working notes end up, because the useful part of a project is almost never the screenshot.
The studio opened in 2019 with one laptop and a spreadsheet of leads. The first year taught us that a website is rarely a design problem: it is a decision problem with a design attached. Which font loads first, which section gets cut, what happens on a four-year-old Android phone on hotel wifi.
For three years the answers lived in a private repository. Every time a client asked why a page felt slow, or why we refused to add a fifth typeface, the reasoning was already written down somewhere. Publishing those notes cost us nothing and saved the same explanation twice a month.
Reef Notes is that repository, cleaned up. Some entries are build logs with numbers in them, some are arguments about type, some cover the unglamorous half of freelancing: scoping, quoting, being paid on time. All of them come out of work we actually did.
Three rules we have not yet found a good reason to break.
Taste settles nothing about performance. We publish the before and after numbers, including the times a change made things worse.
The boring version launches on time, survives a redesign and still works with JavaScript off. Cleverness is what we add once the boring version is live.
If an answer takes more than five minutes to explain, it becomes a post. Clients get the link, we get our afternoon back.
Short bios, honest job titles, and every post each of us has signed.
Founder and web developer
Mara opened the studio in 2016 after eight years in agencies, and still writes most of the HTML that ships. She is happiest on the boring parts of a project: naming, data modelling, and the contract clause nobody wants to read.
Performance engineer
Noor joined from a retail platform where a hundred milliseconds had a price tag attached, and brought the habit of measuring before arguing. She owns the studio's field data pipeline and the uncomfortable meeting where we show clients what their site does on a five year old phone.
Interface designer
Tomas designs in the browser, which is a polite way of saying he redraws his own comps three times before anyone sees them. He runs the studio's type and colour decisions, and keeps a spreadsheet of every contrast ratio we have ever argued about.
We take on three or four projects a year, mostly redesigns for teams of under twenty people. If the timing lines up, tell us what is in the way.
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