Building CoverTurn as the studio I run.
CoverTurn is the studio I founded in 2024. Brand, web, and product work for small businesses, designed and built to a production standard, end to end. This is how it runs now, in 2026.
Seven years of client work. CoverTurn is what that became.
I had been designing and shipping client websites for five years before I founded CoverTurn in 2024. Custom sites for small businesses, brand to launch. The skill set: brand, layout, typography, motion, production code.
CoverTurn turned that work into a studio. Custom websites and brand systems for the small-business owner who needs the standard of a senior team without the price tag.
Two years in, the work is in production for real clients, with a brand and a delivery process built around shipping fast without dropping the standard.
"Standard first. Speed second. Never the other way around."
Editorial restraint. Built to read serious.
By 2026 the answer was tighter than where the studio started. Editorial restraint, burnt sienna on ink, type doing most of the work. A small-business owner reads restraint as premium, and a brand that holds its own in 32 seconds of scrolling is worth more than one that shouts in the first three.
The wordmark is typographic, not a boxed monogram. A sienna parallelogram after the wordmark, italicised words on key headlines. The palette is warm black, burnt sienna, off-white. Nothing else competes for attention.
The studio's own marketing site.
Same brief I would give a client, applied to myself. Five-scope fixed pricing on the page. A work grid showing live client work and studio explorations side by side. An editorial closing block that inverts to cream to break the dark register. Motion baked in. Production code, deployed to Cloudflare Pages.
Live at coverturn.com, embedded at the top of this page.
Live client sites. Standard, end to end.
The studio's most public proof is the client work it ships. Maximus Elite, a London hospitality recruiter, is the case study sitting next to this one. Brand and a full multi-page site, delivered in 48 hours, now her main inbound channel.
Alongside the client work, the studio site carries a grid of studio explorations across niches. A nail tech in Clapham, a barber in Atlanta, a medspa, a lash artist. Each one a complete brand and site concept, used to show small-business owners what their own brand could look like under the same hand.
What two years of running a studio actually proves.
Two years building CoverTurn taught me what shipping at production density actually feels like. The client work, the brand iterations, the studio site, the delivery process. Every piece, built to a standard.
The studio runs on. The next chapter is also opening 20 hours a week to embed with one agency or product team. Same standard, applied inside someone else's brief.
I'm Ishmael. London-born, Black British, designer who ships.
Seven years shipping client websites, the last two running CoverTurn, the studio I founded in 2024. Brand, interface, production code, deploy. I own delivery end to end.
Available for one embedded partner. One agency or product team, 20 hours a week, shipped under your brand. Also open to founding-designer and design-engineer roles.
Background: A View at Hampstead with Stormy Weather, John Constable, ca. 1830. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Public Domain · CC0.