Rhumb Studio is a creative web studio based between Bristol and Paris. One of us works from each city, one hour of time difference, everything else is shared. We launched formally at the end of 2024, and we’re still figuring out what that means in practice.

We’re aiming to build websites that feel like somewhere where space, motion, and interaction go beyond what a standard build would attempt. Sometimes that’s a fully navigable 3D environment. Sometimes it’s something subtler.

How we got here

Jack ran a podcast called Webflail. He’d talk to freelancers and people working on the web out of curiosity and a genuine love for connecting with people. Maël was one of those conversations, in the summer of 2023. We stayed in touch after that, had occasional calls and helped each other grow our freelance work. Jack leaning into content creation and marketing, Maël into development. It grew into weekly sessions where we’d work through each other’s problems.

At some point Maël mentioned wanting to move away from agency white-labelling and find his own clients. Jack offered to help him find projects and kick start things by handling the content side, and started posting his work online to build traction. Slowly it gained attention, a few opportunities came in, and that’s when we decided to do it properly together.

Before Rhumb, Jack had worked with Dexter Washington at Crafted Studios, then in marketing at Edgar Allan, before going freelance. Maël had spent years at Tambien Studio and collaborating with agencies on a white-label basis. The rest followed naturally.

What we’re about

We both came to this with years of freelance work behind us and a shared obsession with what the web can do. That curiosity led us both, independently, toward more experimental territory: 3D spaces, interactions that feel physical, experiences that go beyond what a standard build would attempt.

We experiment a lot outside of client work. Partly because we’re always looking to learn something new, partly because we just love building things. We’re drawn to the idea that a website can feel like somewhere. That it can have atmosphere, light, a sense of space. That’s what pulls us toward 3D, toward motion, toward interactions that go beyond the expected.

It feels like the industry moves faster and faster. New tools, new trends, new opportunities appear constantly and it’s easy to be drawn towards the next thing. We’re trying to resist that pull and focus on what actually matters to us, finding people who love what they do and building things we’re all proud of.

The studio as the work

When we built rhumb.co, we wanted it to be a direct expression of how we think. The homepage opens on the exterior of a building lit from within. You move through it and enter the interior: a warm room with considered furniture, ambient light, artwork on the walls. Each space connects to a different part of the studio. The navigation is spatial.

It’s something we keep coming back to, 3D spaces as a way to give a site atmosphere and substance. Color, light, depth. Things that are hard to achieve on a flat surface. We’ve used it across past projects where the goal was to create a world around the work rather than just present it. The 3D becomes the environment the content lives inside.

The technical side of that starts in Blender, where we model, texture and bake full scenes before they ever reach the browser. Baking means the heavy lighting work happens offline, so what loads in the browser is fast and lean. On top of that we layer custom shaders that add dynamic specular, normal mapping and ambient occlusion in real time. That combination is what gives the scenes their depth and atmosphere, without compromising performance.

For delivery, we work in two ways depending on the project. For complex builds we use Next.js with React Three Fiber and a headless CMS, which gives clients full ownership of their content without touching the code. For faster, more contained projects we use Webflow, where our own Vite template lets us inject custom code and build specific features without losing the speed and flexibility Webflow offers.

The stack changes. The goal doesn’t: scenes that feel alive, and sites that clients can actually manage long after we hand them over.

How we work

Being two is a choice we think about. There’s no loss of information, no time wasted in translation. One point of contact, full ownership of every detail.

We communicate a lot, quickly and without friction. That dynamic keeps things moving and keeps the work honest. We share references, things we find online, experiments we’re running. That constant exchange feeds directly into the work. We’re always building something or trying something outside of client projects, and that curiosity shows up in what we make.

We’re not trying to grow into a large team. We want to stay focused, taking on the right projects, working with people who care, and having enough space to keep experimenting. That’s what sustainable looks like to us.

We’re at the beginning. There’s a lot we’re still figuring out, about running a studio, about the kind of work we want to make, about who we want to make it with. But we know what pulls us forward: curiosity, craft, and people who care about what they’re building.

If that sounds like you, we’d love to hear from you.