Design and engineering studio, Brisbane

A human writes it. The machine draws it. Same hands.

Drawn live in your browser drawing…

We're a small studio for product design and engineering. We take a project from the first rough idea to a finished product, and the same few people do all of it. You won't get handed off to a different team halfway through.

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01  ·  What we do

One team, the whole way.

The strategy, the design and the code all come from the same team. Your project doesn't get handed to someone else to finish.

01

Strategy

Before anything gets designed, we work out what the product is for and what the first version actually has to do. Most of the time that means cutting the idea back to something we can build and put in front of people quickly.

02

Design

We design the whole product, not just the screens that look good in a pitch. That includes the empty states and the error messages that usually get left until last. The aim is for it to feel like one thing, instead of a pile of features bolted together.

03

Engineering

The people who designed it are the ones who write the code, so nothing gets lost explaining the work to a separate team. We test what we ship, and we try to leave the codebase in a state the next developer won't curse us for.

04

Care

Launch isn't the finish line. We stay on to fix what breaks and build what's missing once people are using the thing day to day, which is usually when you find out what it really needed.

02  ·  How a project moves

From brief to shipped.

Every project runs roughly the same way. We work out the scope, design it, build it, and get it in front of real people as early as we can. Nothing sits in a queue waiting on another team.

We work in short loops, so it's never long before there's something real you can click on and use.

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03 · How we work

Things we won't bend on.

A short list. These four hold no matter the project or the deadline.

01 The person who designs a thing is the same one who builds it, so nothing gets lost in a handover.
02 We'd rather show you a small working version than a big plan on a slide, so we get something real in your hands early.
03 If we don't think a feature will make the product better, we'll tell you, and we won't build it.
04 We try to hand back a codebase that's tidier than the one we started with.

04  ·  Selected work

Recent work.

Brisbane property maintenance — six trades, one person to talk to, one statement.

Three Agents do property maintenance across Brisbane, Logan and Ipswich: repairs, painting, plastering, cleaning and yards, with one person to talk to instead of six trades to coordinate. Their whole pitch is that a job ends on one clear statement, so we designed and built the site around that sentence — the six scopes are a deck of work-order cards, and the year's jobs total themselves up in front of you.

The Three Agents home page: "The job list. Properly done." beside six fanned work-scope cards, one per trade.
  • 06 Work scopes
  • 01 Statement

  • The pitch is the centrepiece.

    Every job ends on one clear statement, so the homepage's centrepiece is one: the year's work inks in line by line as you scroll, and the running total rolls over like an odometer. Scroll back up and it un-writes itself.

  • The camera is the intake.

    A maintenance job is easier to photograph than to describe. On a phone the site keeps a fixed bar of the three things you'd actually do - call, text, send a photo - and the photo button opens a message that's already typed. The quote starts in the customer's camera roll, not in a form.

  • One card open at a time.

    The six scopes are a deck of flip cards: the front is the colour swatch, the back is the work order. Scroll turns them - whichever card sits nearest the middle of the screen is the open one, on the way down and on the way back up, never more than one at once. A tap does the same thing.

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An Istanbul property advisory, built as the opposite of a listing portal.

Erfan is an independent property and investment advisor in Istanbul, and most of his clients are deciding on the move from another country. Almost everything else in that business is a listing portal, so we built the opposite: no search filters, no enquiry forms, and six pages that give someone enough to judge him before they write. We designed and built the whole thing.

The Erfan Naji home page: a dark layout headed "Property in Istanbul is a conversation, not a form", with a message box beside a portrait.
  • 06 Pages
  • 00 Forms

  • No forms anywhere.

    Every other site in the category opens with a filter panel and closes with an enquiry form. Here the visitor writes a sentence in their own words and it opens in WhatsApp, where Erfan answers himself. Nothing is stored on the way through.

  • Six pages, written by hand.

    No framework and no build step - the HTML that ships is the HTML we wrote. It loads fast on a phone in a country where the connection is not guaranteed, and it will still be editable years after any framework we picked would have moved on.

  • The about page keeps his record.

    His credentials sit on a map you can drag: verified facts on sprung wires around a portrait. Every fact on it also exists in the prose underneath, so the page still says everything it needs to with the script switched off.

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Brisbane building and pest inspectors, with their independence as the argument.

HFT are independent building and pest inspectors in South East Queensland. They take no kickbacks from agents or builders, and they wanted a site that made that independence clear without making a big deal of it. We designed and built the whole thing.

The HFT home page: "Building & Pest Inspections in Brisbane" over a dark layout, with the QBCC licence number shown on the hero photograph.
  • 13 Pages
  • 06 Service areas

  • The licence is on the first screen.

    Independence is the whole reason to hire them over an agent's recommendation, so the QBCC number, the insurance and the standards they inspect to are stated in the hero rather than buried on an about page.

  • A page per area they cover.

    Brisbane, Ipswich, Logan, Redlands, Moreton Bay and the Gold Coast each get their own page, because that is how people actually search for an inspector - by the suburb they are buying in, not by the company name.

  • Prerendered, then hydrated.

    Every route is rendered to static HTML at build time, so the full content, titles and structured data are in the response before any JavaScript runs. Search engines get a finished page; the visitor still gets a fast app afterwards.

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Visit HFT Building & Pest Inspections
See all work

05 · Start

Have something you want built?

Tell us what you're trying to build and we'll come back with how we'd tackle it and whether we're the right people for the job.

Start a project +61 401 508 887 studio@luma-tech.com.au
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