Digital agency · Est. 2019 · Rotterdam / NYC
We build websites with a spine.
No templates. No themes. No mercy.
The internet is drowning in polite websites. Same hero. Same three cards. Same testimonial slider limping across the fold.
A template is a decision someone else made about your business. We think that should offend you.
We set type like it costs money — because it used to, and it should still feel that way.
Strata Collective is eleven designers, engineers and one very opinionated typesetter. We take on eight projects a year. We turn down more work than we accept, usually politely. Clients hire us when the brand deserves better than a page builder, and stay because the numbers agree.
— The Collective, in ink
Set as a specimen — every service in its working size.
Wordmarks, grids, voice. The whole skeleton — not a logo on a moodboard.
Hand-built front ends, headless backends, zero page-builder residue.
Type that moves because it means something, not because it can.
Copy with teeth. Art direction for words, not just pictures.
Canvas, WebGL, shaders, physics — deployed sparingly, tuned obsessively.
Departures board. All destinations final. Hover a row to re-flap it.
A 40,000-item photography archive that read like a spreadsheet. We rebuilt it as an editorial object — full-bleed plates, a typographic index, search that feels like flipping contact sheets.
A century-old shipping firm with a website younger than its interns and twice as forgettable. We gave them a departure-board identity and a quoting flow that cut the sales call out of the loop.
Craft brewery, cult following, invisible online. We set their whole catalogue like a broadsheet beer list — one enormous page, no product grid in sight. It got screenshotted more than it got scrolled.
Proof that brutalism converts in conservative sectors. Black ink, one accent, case results set like verdicts. Partners feared it; the intake numbers converted them faster than we did.
Two weeks of questions you'll find uncomfortable. What the business actually sells, who actually buys it, and why the last website lied about both.
Before wireframes, before moodboards: your voice, set in type, at scale. If the words don't hold the page alone, no amount of gradient will save them.
Design and engineering at one desk. Motion tuned by hand, performance budgeted like money, every breakpoint treated as a first-class edition.
We break it before your users do. Slow phones, screen readers, hostile viewports. Then we ship it and watch the numbers with you for a quarter.
Two rooms, two time zones, one standard.
Rotterdam handles mornings, New York handles the rest. We work with eight clients a year and we're picky about all of them. If your brief starts with “we like what Apple does,” save us both the call.
Currently booking Q1 2027.