Long-form essays on craft, process, and the economics of premium. Quarterly. Unsponsored. Eleven essays, two years.
The site goes live, the team takes a screenshot, the client posts on LinkedIn. We stay quiet. A defence of the cooling-off period, and what we do during it instead.
A field note on the rules we keep — what we let assistants do, what we never let them touch, and why the boundary keeps moving. This site is the proof.
Two out of three briefs we get aren't a fit. Here's how we say so without burning the bridge — and why doing it well is its own marketing.
A practical inventory of which parts of a NOVA build still render, navigate, and submit forms when JS is off. Spoiler: most of it.
How a two-font pair and a single accent colour can carry a premium identity further than any imagery — and why we lean on it.
Why every NOVA engagement includes three weeks of post-launch support — and three months of being on the phone after that, free.
A short guide to writing a brief that actually gets you a useful reply — from any studio, not just NOVA.
The CI rules that keep a NOVA site fast on launch — and three years after — even as content shifts and editors take over.
A note on capacity. Why the studio caps at three to four engagements a year, and what that does to both quality and the calendar.
On reducing the studio's motion language to four curves and six durations. Why a smaller vocabulary, used precisely, beats a larger one.
On founding a small studio in a year when everyone said small studios were over. (They weren't.)
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