Hi, we’re Bits&Letters, a design & technology studio based in New Jersey.
There’s a scene in the first season of Mad Men where one of the junior mad-men tells Peggy, the aspiring mad-woman, that “creative” is just a loss leader for what their agency actually sells — ad placements.
The modern, digital version of this is when a web design agency describes themselves as a “collective of makers and dreamers committed to driving growth,” talking about “digital transformation” or “inventing the future,” while hoping very much that you’ll hire them to put HTML pages on a server.
Does design matter? Of course it does, but the mark of a big-time agency isn’t the size of their ideas — it’s how well they can execute at scale. As a designer myself, it’s almost too sad to imagine that brilliant UX, copywriting, art direction, etc. are less important than, say, making sure the marketing team knows where to put new Google Analytics tags.
I’m not trying to say we make ugly websites. We make very good-looking websites; here are a few of them:
What I am saying is that good design is how it works, not just how it looks. And that includes:
Content Management
We specialize in building sites atop open-source content management platforms like WordPress and Sanity, so you can easily add or update pages without having to call (and pay for) developer time—whether you have just one page or thousands.
Design Systems
We build modular, scalable style and component systems, to help your site grow while looking effortlessly fabulous. Depending on your brand and website needs, we can do something simple like writing a basic style sheet, something more powerful like a custom component library, or anything in between.
Secure, Powerful Platforms
We build sites that look great and run beautifully on all major browsers & devices, and work with some of the most respected names in hosting — WP Engine, Vercel, Cloudflare — so they work hard for you 24/7/365.
10 principles of good design by Dieter Rams
- Good design is honest
- Good design is long-lasting
- Good design makes a product useful
- Good design makes a product understandable
- Good design is aesthetic
- Good design is innovative
- Good design is environmentally friendly
- Good design is thorough down to the last detail
- Good design is as little design as possible