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Frisson

The independent design & development studio behind my freelance work

Case StudyFrissonStudio
2 min read

Whenever I mention "freelance work" on this site, I mean Frisson. It is the small, independent design and development studio I run, and everything I build outside of my day-to-day lives under that name.


The name comes from the French word for that involuntary shiver of aesthetic pleasure; the chill of something done exactly right. That is the bar for every project: nothing is accidental, nothing is generic.

A one-file statement of intent

The current frisson.supply homepage is deliberately tiny: a single hand-written HTML file with all CSS inlined, no framework, no JavaScript. Even at that size, the craft is there:

  • Full theming through CSS custom properties, with automatic dark mode via prefers-color-scheme
  • A staggered entrance animation, gated behind prefers-reduced-motion so it never plays for people who opted out
  • Visible :focus-visible outlines and semantic headings
  • One warm orange accent color for hover and focus states

It is a placeholder, but it already says what the studio is about: you do not need a build pipeline to care about details.

What Frisson is working on

Three projects are in flight right now, and each has its own post:

  • Tracker: a minimal, self-hosted Strava replacement. Open source and live today.
  • Racket Tuning: a CMS-driven service and ecommerce site for a Dutch racket-tuning specialist. Not released yet.
  • Mai: a portfolio and agency site built on Astro and Sanity. Also not released yet.

They sit at very different points on the complexity spectrum, from a dependency-light personal tool to a full CMS-and-payments platform, but they share the same ethos and, increasingly, the same conventions: kebab-case everywhere, CSS Modules with @layer, conventional commits.


More on each of them in their own write-ups. If you want to work together, feel free to contact me.