We build by leaving things out
Most of what makes a WordPress site good is what we choose to leave out of it. WordPress runs a large part of the web on a big promise: whatever you need, there’s a plugin for it. That promise is one of its greatest appeals, and its most costly trap. Almost everything that harms a WordPress site...
Standardise the foundations, not the brand experience
Detailed work at scale comes down to one judgement: which parts of a project are worth building fresh for every brand, and which should be solved once and reused everywhere. Shared functionality on one side, brand expression on the other Engineering teams have plenty of frameworks and platforms to...
Putting video back where it belongs
The problem with putting video in a git repo. The repo kept getting heavier, sprint after sprint. We were committing big MP4s next to the code, builds were slowing down, and deploys with them. Case studies lead with video, so every new client made it worse. We needed the media to live somewhere...
Twenty-four modules, one wrapper
Every case study was its own Astro page. That was the first problem. Each page had its own layout logic, its own spacing decisions, its own way of handling full-bleed sections versus contained text. Some used inline styles. Some used one-off SCSS files. None of them agreed on what "default spacing"...
The form we actually trust
In February 2026, we replaced our contact form with a submission pipeline we built and own. For the two years before that, it was a Pipedrive iframe inside our page. We had no control over fields, no client-side validation, no error handling beyond whatever Pipedrive showed inside its frame. When a...
We test the revenue path
The contact form is the only page on this site that generates leads. So that's where the tests live. We don't chase coverage numbers. What we have is a targeted set of tests aimed at the things that would hurt if they broke: the forms, the pipeline that processes submissions and the CI that catches...
Letting type move
We treat type as something that sits still — fixed in place, headings always the biggest thing, motion bolted on at the end. For one Creative Spark we dropped those rules and asked what type could do once it started moving. Creative Spark is our in-house R&D session: ninety minutes, a single theme,...
The cache that doubled as a coordinator
The rendering engine is what visitors see. The data layer feeds it, and keeping it stable under load was the less glamorous half of the build. This is the second post in the ON Labs series. The first covered the WebGL engine: shaders, draw calls, the GPU-level stuff. This one is about what happens...
The testbed nobody will see
Every case study was a standalone Astro page with its own layout, its own component imports and its own way of breaking on mobile. Twenty-two of them. Each one built at a different time by a different combination of people, with whatever patterns felt right that week. Changing shared behavior (a...
Two months in Three.js, we started over
Two months into a Three.js prototype, the transition we wanted still wasn't there. We could see it in our heads and not on the screen. That was the moment we started over from scratch. Labs uses real-time shaders, physics-style interactions and transitions that happen at the GPU level. That...