I'm Ousmane — an independent designer and front-end engineer working as Studio Vellum. I take the whole thing end to end: the type, the words, the motion, and the code that ships it. Eleven years, three of them solo, mostly for publishers, founders, and the occasional museum.
Each one shipped from a blank repo to a live domain by me alone — strategy, type, build. The rest of the archive is a conversation away.
A 40-year-old literary journal moving online without losing its spine. I drew a Fraunces-led type scale, wrote a flat-file CMS their editors actually enjoy, and built a reader that holds a 68-character measure on every screen down to a phone.
A coastal restaurant group with eleven rooms and one frustrating reservation page. I rebuilt the public site and the host-stand dashboard as one design language — warm, confident, fast — and cut their no-show rate by a third with a quieter reminder flow.
A small modern-art museum wanted its archive to feel like a slow walk through the building, not a database. I built a scroll-paced gallery with hand-tuned WebGL transitions that still falls back to a clean, fast page when the GPU isn't there.
I'd rather ship one page that someone remembers than ten that scroll past unnoticed.
I started in print — laying out a campus magazine on a borrowed copy of InDesign — and never quite left the sensibility behind. Tight measures, real hierarchy, type that does the heavy lifting. Then I learned to code so nobody could tell me a layout was impossible.
Today I work alone, by choice. One project at a time, with the person who'll actually live with the result — usually a founder, an editor, or a curator who cares about the craft as much as I do. I write the strategy, draw every screen, and hand-build the front end so the live site matches the file to the pixel. No handoffs, no telephone game, no "we'll fix it in dev."
I'm not a specialist you brief and wait on. The disciplines below live in the same head, so the seams between strategy, type, and code simply don't exist.
“Ousmane is the only contractor who's ever handed me a build that needed nothing. The live site was the file. It still is.”
“We came for a logo and left with a whole posture. Eleven rooms, one voice — and a booking page our guests actually finish.”
Just me, through to deploy. That's the whole point — no design-to-dev handoff means nothing gets lost in translation. For larger backends I bring in one trusted engineer I've worked with for six years, and I stay accountable for the front end.
A typical site is six weeks: one week of strategy and type studies, three of design-in-the-browser, two of build and polish. You see the real thing on a staging URL by day nine — no flat mockups that lie about how it'll feel.
Yes. I ship on Vellum, my own flat-file CMS, or your stack of choice if you have one. Editors get a calm Markdown interface and a 20-minute screen recording. No plugin sprawl, no surprise renewal bill in year two.
No. It's pages that respect a reader's attention — fast, framework-light, with real typographic hierarchy and motion that earns its place. Often that looks rich, not bare. The constraint is meaning per byte, not pixels per screen.
Both, lightly. After launch most clients keep a half-day-a-month care plan for changes, new issues, and the occasional new section. I cap retainers at four at a time so the work — and the relationship — stays personal.
Tell me what it is, who it's for, and roughly when. I reply to every real note within two business days — usually with a question or two and an honest read on whether I'm the right desk for it.