Crtzax
Overview
Crtzax was going to be my own studio: one person in North Carolina, working with clients anywhere. The line was “digital work that refuses to blend in.” I built the whole thing out before taking a single client: the brand, the site, the brief form, fifteen branded email templates, and the software to run the business behind it.
Challenge
A studio is more than a website. It needed a voice people would remember, a process clients could trust (Discover, Direction, Create, Ship), an easy way to take a brief, and back-office tools for clients, projects and invoices. All of it had to be run by one person.
Outcome
Everything was built and ready to go. But I wasn't in the right position to run a studio full-time, so I chose not to launch it. None of it went to waste: the motion system, the brief form and the way I think about a site's first impression carried straight into the work I do now, this site included.
Key features.
- 01A complete brand system, “Specimen,” which is basically a type specimen sheet crossed with an engineering drawing
- 02A static Astro 5 site with GSAP and Lenis motion, a shutter-style reveal and reduced-motion fallbacks throughout
- 03A one-question-at-a-time project brief: keyboard shortcuts, saved drafts, a honeypot and invisible Turnstile, sent by a Cloudflare Pages Function through Resend
- 04Six service pages with process stages, FAQs and structured data, each with its own generated share card
- 05A client portal and CRM on Cloudflare Workers, D1 and R2 (passkeys, two-factor, projects, private files) with 290 passing tests
- 06A lighter ops tool for clients, invoices with generated PDFs, inquiries and outreach, with no framework and no dependencies
The brand
A signal-red mark built from soft lobes inside a hard grid, set against ink and bone. Big condensed type, a single italic serif word for emphasis, and engineering-drawing details all over: coordinates, figure numbers, hairlines.
The site
Fully static Astro with one interactive island. A width-stretching hero headline, line-by-line reveals, magnetic buttons, a custom cursor and a shutter that opens on the studio. Self-hosted fonts and no third-party requests by default.
The brief
Instead of a long form, a full-screen brief asks one thing at a time: name, how to reply, the company, the current site, what we're making, budget, timing, then the project. It greets you by name, remembers your answers, and every step can be answered from the keyboard.
The back office
Behind the site sat a client portal and CRM (sign-in with passkeys and two-factor, projects and tasks, private file sharing), plus a leaner ops tool for invoices, inquiries and outreach, and a set of branded email templates for every stage of a project.
Stack
The screens.
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