Hello,
Universe.

Viljami S. Design is a digital product design studio based in Helsinki, Finland. We help our clients succeed through innovative thinking and craftsmanship.

Tell us about your project

We’re a tiny but mighty studio.* We’ve handcrafted websites
and apps for more than one hundred clients over 13 years.

Design isn’t just about the look and feel. Design is how it works, and we believe the best way to focus on this is to work as close to the end result as possible. That’s why we start all our projects with simple sketches, and quickly transition into designing working prototypes in code. This is done by the same designers who started the work, which ensures that our original design intent is carried all the way to the end product.

Our core belief is that the products we design should work across anything that can access the web. Whether it’s a laptop, a smartphone, a watch, or even a browser integrated into a car’s dashboard. Previously, we worked in Silicon Valley designing digital products for everyone from startups to Fortune 500 companies. Today, we’re focused on helping our own clients to succeed in their businesses. Have a project in mind?

Responsive Websites
Progressive Web Apps
Rapid Prototyping
Design Systems
User Experience Design
Data Visualizations
Front-End Development
Digital Typography
Information Architecture
Research and Usability
Website Optimization
Consulting

We’re passionate about what we do. Below you can find
a few of the projects we’ve been working with.

Reimagining static website hosting

Introducing a better way to host websites on Amazon S3.

Creating a tool

Simulating typeface legibility under different viewing conditions.

Rethinking feature detection

A fast and simple feature detection library in 1kb.

Designing a website

A photographer and sculptor creating modern, conceptual art.

Not convinced yet? See how we approach design systems & what our process looks like.

Close Project

Upstatic is a tool that makes deploying websites to Amazon S3 as easy as pushing changes to GitHub. Upstatic automatically configures everything for you so you don’t have to. We’re responsible for the identity, copywriting, IA/UX/UI design, and development for the website.

View Website

Legibility App, made by Viljami S. Design

Legibility App is a free tool for typeface and UI designers for evaluating typeface legibility under different viewing conditions. Inspired by a recent talk of ours, called Typography for User Interfaces, the Legibility App works by applying a level of filters—like vision, blur, overglow, and pixelation—on top of text.

View Website

Feature.js is a fast, simple, and lightweight browser feature detection library. It has no dependencies and weighs only 1kb minified and gzipped. In addition to creating the library itself, we’re responsible for the identity, copywriting, design, and development of the website. You can view the source code here.

View Website

Asko Salminen is a Finnish artist who creates modern sculptures and conceptual art, often combined with strong black & white photography. Along with the website concept, design, and development, we wrote an article about the media queries used: Scaling with EM units.

View Website

Our open source tools are well known in the industry.
Here are some of the organizations that use them.

Viljami S. Design’s open source tools are used by these organizations

Responsive Nav Navigation plugin without library dependencies and with fast touch screen support.

Stars 4.1K Forks 675

Responsive Slides Simple and lightweight responsive carousel plugin in 1kb.

Stars 3.3K Forks 1.6K

Feature.js A fast, simple and lightweight browser feature detection library in 1kb.

Stars 3.1K Forks 129

Remote Preview A tool for previewing any Web URL on large number of mobile devices simultaneously.

Stars 1.3K Forks 136

Vue Design System A Vue.js based open source tool for building UI Design System.

Stars 1.2K Forks 109

Tiny Nav Responsive navigation plugin that weighs just 443 bytes.

Stars 659 Forks 235

Molten Leading Adjust line-height automatically based on element width for optimal readability.

Stars 543 Forks 39

Scale CSS A Mobile first typography boilerplate based on Chromatic Scale.

Stars 201 Forks 18

We write* about design, tools, processes and more.
It’s our way of thinking & sharing knowledge.

Establishing An Open Device Lab

Sep 24th, 2012

Managing a personal device lab can be quite hard with an ever expanding number of devices. It’s not only expensive, but also bad for our environment. Thankfully, there are better ways to handle the problem.

Introducing Vue Design System

Mar 13th, 2018

What initially started as a quick-n-dirty prototyping tool for a client of mine, has grown into a fully capable systems tool that provides an environment where the pattern library and live application can be perfectly in sync.

My Workspace

Feb 19th, 2018

I’m happy. I’ve been succesfully running my design studio for the past 8 months and recently moved into a new office space. Since then I’ve been setting up the workspace to suit the way I want to work and create things.

On Design Tools and Processes

Feb 12th, 2017

We’ve moved away from designing static pages to creating digital systems of components, but we’ve done that mostly by using the same static design tools like Illustrator, Sketch, or even Figma. Tools that haven’t changed on a fundamental level in the past three decades. Why?

The Future of Web Fonts

Oct 9th, 2016

We love typefaces. They give our sites and applications personalized feel. They convey the information and tell a story. They establish information hierarchy. But they’re also full of problems.

Typography for User Interfaces

Jun 21st, 2016

Every word and letter in an interface matters. Good writing is good design. Text is ultimately interface, and it’s us, the designers, who are the copywriters shaping this information.

We’re a tiny but mighty studio.* We’ve handcrafted websites and apps for more than one hundred clients over 13 years.

We’re passionate about what we do. Below you can find a few of the projects we’ve been working with.

Introducing a better way to host websites on Amazon S3.

Simulating typeface legibility under different viewing conditions.

A fast and simple feature detection library in 1kb.

A photographer and sculptor creating modern, conceptual art.

Our open source tools are well known in the industry. Here are some of the orga­ni­za­tions that use them.

We write* about design, tools, processes and more. It’s our way of thinking & sharing knowledge.

Establishing An Open Device Lab

Introducing Vue Design System

My Workspace

On Design Tools and Processes

The Future of Web Fonts

Typography for User Interfaces

We’d love to hear from you. We’re available for both local and remote projects around the world.

We’re a tiny but mighty studio.* We’ve handcrafted websites
and apps for more than one hundred clients over 13 years.

We’re passionate about what we do. Below you can find
a few of the projects we’ve been working with.

Our open source tools are well known in the industry.
Here are some of the organizations that use them.

We write* about design, tools, processes and more.
It’s our way of thinking & sharing knowledge.

We’d love to hear from you. We’re available for both
local and remote projects around the world.