Studio EMOSI

A creative studio with a finished design and no one to build it. Studio EMOSI was founded in Brussels in 2022 by Gilles Parmentier. It conceives and produces its own cultural projects from start to finish: ceramic brussels, the first international contemporary art fair dedicated to ceramics, out of office, the social gathering for Brussels art professionals, and neuvième art, a fair for original comic art. The studio’s designer, Léonie Lefere, had already drawn the whole site in Figma. What was missing was a team that would build it exactly as drawn, put it online and keep it there.

The Challenge

The brief came in one line from Gilles to Léonie: send the design to Perel Web Studio, they handle the hosting, the launch and the mobile adaptation. Behind that line sat a demanding design.

The site is built on a visible grid, monospaced type, thin white rules and an offset layout where nothing is meant to face anything else squarely. That kind of design does not survive approximate integration. A rule one pixel thicker on one page, a grey that should be pure white, a caption glued to its photo: each one is small, and together they are the difference between the designer’s site and a template that looks a bit like it.

What had to be solved:

• Build seven pages from a Figma file without redesigning a single one of them
• Keep the animations and hover states the mockups specified, not a simplified version
• Make an offset, grid based desktop layout work on a phone without losing its character
• Give the designer a way to review and correct the build at her level of detail
• Host it, run it and leave the studio with nothing to maintain

What We Built

Through our Figma to website service, we treated the Figma file as the specification, not as inspiration.

Seven pages, exactly as drawn. A homepage that presents the projects by status, upcoming, new or on hold, a portfolio index, an about page with the team, and one page per project, each with its facts table, its key figures and its photo layout.

A faithful integration, down to the line weight. Pure #FFFFFF text everywhere, grey kept only for hover states, the same rule thickness under the header on every page, a fixed header, captions set slightly apart from their images, © credits on every photograph. These are not details we chose. They are the details the designer asked for, and we kept every one.

A layout that stays offset on purpose. On the project pages, images, facts tables and key figures are staggered so they never face each other head on. That is the visual signature of the site, and it had to hold on a 1440 pixel screen and on a phone.

A mobile version designed, not shrunk. Landscape photographs run the full width of the screen with no margin, status badges move beside the date, project titles scale down so they never break mid word, and the portfolio keeps its event type and year on mobile too.

Original images, properly optimised. The pictures were replaced with the photographers’ originals, then compressed and served in modern formats at responsive sizes, so the site stays sharp without getting heavy.

Astro on Cloudflare, nothing to maintain. The site is static, generated with Astro and served from Cloudflare’s edge. No database, no plugins, no updates to apply. Hosting and maintenance were offered to the studio.

The Design Review Process

The part that made this project work was a review loop built around the designer, not around us.

The first version went online on a development link eleven days after the mockups arrived. From there, Léonie reviewed the build the way she would review a print proof: desktop and mobile, page by page, with annotated screenshots and Figma prototype links for anything that had moved. Lilanga, our front end developer, applied each round and sent back a summary of every change, point by point.

Four rounds ran between July and September. The first was long and precise, from logo files to line spacing. Along the way the content evolved too: a project left the site, a new text arrived for the ceramic brussels page, the team section gained links. By the fourth round there was a single item left on one mobile page. Her verdict after that: “The studio emosi website looks perfect to me as is, it’s ready to go live.”

The Results

Live on studio-emosi.com in September 2026, built from the designer’s Figma with no redesign along the way.

94/100 on mobile and 97/100 on desktop, measured on PageSpeed Insights in October 2026, with 100/100 on accessibility and best practices.

Four review rounds, then a sign off. The designer approved the site as it stands, which is the only acceptance criterion a design led project really has.

The start of a longer collaboration. The same team then trusted us with the rebuild of the ceramic brussels website, on Astro with a Sanity CMS their editors run themselves.

What This Project Is Really About

When a client arrives with a finished design, the job is not to have opinions about it. It is to build it so precisely that the designer recognises her own work, and to make the review process easy enough that she can get it there. A studio that works with its own designer needs a developer who respects that, and then disappears into the hosting.