Saffron

Saffron Designs — Drawn from the real thing

Websites that win awards — and pass every audit.

Most award-winning sites quietly fail their own performance and accessibility tests. Ours don't. Beautiful enough to be recognised. Engineered well enough to prove it.

Awwwards standardAudited every buildWCAG 2.2 AACore Web Vitals greenTypography-led Awwwards standardAudited every buildWCAG 2.2 AACore Web Vitals greenTypography-led

The studio

Pretty is a claim. Proven is a receipt. We build the rare kind of website that is both — work you'd frame on a wall, engineered to survive an inspection.

01 —

Typography first

Every layout is built outward from the type scale. The words set the architecture; decoration never leads.

02 —

One idea, executed perfectly

Restraint over spectacle. A single considered gesture per screen beats five effects fighting for attention.

03 —

Craft you can audit

We don't launch until accessibility, best-practices and SEO all read 100 and performance holds in the high nineties on a production build. Then we publish the report — worst run, not best.

The instrument · free, no sign-up

X-ray any website. Live.

Paste a URL — yours, or the competitor keeping you up at night — and watch Google's own Lighthouse engine tear it open: speed, Core Web Vitals, page weight, every failing check, and a ranked list of exactly what we'd fix. The same instrument we hold our own work to, pointed wherever you like.

100/100Our own Lighthouse score
15–45sTo X‑ray any site
ØCost · no email required
  • Four live scores, the loading filmstrip, and the page as Google renders it
  • Core Web Vitals from real Chrome users — not just the lab
  • A ranked “what we'd fix” — with the seconds and kilobytes each one hands back

No sign-up. Or watch it tear down unseen.co, the reigning Awwwards Studio of the Year.

This checks one page. See what happens when we check the whole machine ↗

The receipts

We audited the most awarded studios alive.

Real Google Lighthouse scores, July 2026. Don't take our word — re-run any of them in the bench above.

unseen.co — Awwwards Studio of the Year 26 Performance · mobile · 32.0s to load
vs
Saffron Designs — this exact site 100 Performance · mobile · 1.6s to load
Live competitor benchmark
Loading benchmark data…

Measured July 2026 via Google Lighthouse (PageSpeed Insights). Performance scores fluctuate with network and server load — treat them as a snapshot, not a verdict on these studios' considerable talent. Notably, the heaviest WebGL sites (Lusion, Active Theory, Locomotive) errored out mid-audit — too heavy for Google's own tool to finish. Every figure here is re-runnable, live, in the bench above.

The engine · Omnisphere

We prove the whole machine.

Lighthouse grades one page. Omnisphere is our whole-site integrity engine — it walks every page, works every button and form, and follows every link across four breakpoints, then returns one honest number: the Site Health Index. Anyone can screenshot a homepage. We prove the machine runs.

  • Every page crawled, every interaction exercised — not one screen
  • Four breakpoints, console & network errors, dead-link detection
  • One Site Health Index — the receipt that it actually works
Enter Omnisphere

Selected work

Three pieces, on our own brief.

Self-directed concept studies — the standard we hold, without a client’s constraints to hide behind. Hover to feel the depth.

Concept piece
'26Identity + digital publication

Meridian Press

A century-old imprint rebuilt as a living digital masthead — modular type system, editorial motion, zero-compromise reading experience.

100
Accessibility, non-negotiable
≤1s
Largest paint, desktop target
0
axe violations at launch
Concept piece
'25Brand system + booking site

Umbra Hotels

A boutique hospitality group given a warm, cinematic identity — with a booking flow that loads instantly on the worst hotel-lobby Wi-Fi in the world.

≤2.5s
Largest paint on throttled 4G
AA
WCAG 2.2 conformance target
0
Blocking third-party scripts
Concept piece
'25Portfolio + editorial

Field & Frame

A photography studio's archive turned into a scroll-driven exhibition — heavy imagery, feather-light delivery, every frame lazy-loaded.

100
Accessibility, non-negotiable
≤120KB
Initial document budget
0
Layout shift above the fold

Under NDA

The clients you'd recognise — we're contractually silent about.

The concept pieces above are self-directed for a reason: the client work isn't ours to publish. Work at this level arrives wrapped in enterprise confidentiality — so instead of a logo wall, you get the shape of the room.

Confidential

A FTSE 100 financial institution

Identity · digital platform
Confidential

A global luxury maison

Brand system · e-commerce
Confidential

A Fortune 50 technology company

Product site · design system
Confidential

An international hospitality group

Booking experience · rebrand
Confidential

A sovereign wealth fund

Corporate identity · reporting
Confidential

A championship sports franchise

Digital rebrand · matchday platform

Every name above is withheld under mutual non-disclosure. That is the trade with work at this level — the bigger the client, the tighter the contract.

Want more than our word for it? Ask and we'll arrange a direct call with a recent client under a one-page mutual NDA — no sales rep in the room, ask them anything you like. Usually set up within a few days once scope is agreed.

Request a client reference

Start your project

Every site begins with a brand soul.

Before we draw a single pixel, you define the DNA — colour, texture, type and personality. Six steps, a live preview, and it's yours to keep. That's where your project begins.

Live · a brand forming

Meridian Press · Sage

Try it — build a brand moodboard

Pick a palette and a voice, and watch a brand take shape. This is the first step every project begins with.

Palette

Voice

Ember & Ink
Words worth keeping.

The approach

A method with a gate at every door.

01
Discovery

We read everything you've published and map the voice you have against the one you want.

Gate · Positioning locked
02
System

Type scale, palette, spacing and motion are defined as tokens before a single page is composed.

Gate · Design system verified
03
Build

Sections are engineered and checked one by one — semantics, responsiveness and accessibility per module.

Gate · Every section passes
04
Audit & launch

Nothing ships until Lighthouse and axe come back clean. Then we hand you the receipts.

Gate · 100 / 100 / 100 / 100

Why choose us

Proof, not promises.

01
See the score first

Run our free X‑Ray audit on your current site — the same Lighthouse engine we hold ourselves to — before you spend a dollar with us.

Free · /audit
02
95+ or it's free

The 7‑Day Fast‑Track ships a five-page site scoring 95 or higher on every Lighthouse category — Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, SEO — or you don't pay a cent.

Ironclad Guarantee
03
A human reads every message

No bots, no ticket queues, no auto-responders. We reply within seven working hours, and a real person is behind every reply.

7-hour response
04
We build our own tools

Omnisphere, our integrity engine, runs automated cross-browser and audit checks most agencies have never heard of — so what ships, stays shipped.

Built in-house

Start a project

Let's build something worth auditing.

Tell us where the brand is headed. We reply within seven working hours — by a human, with honest thoughts on fit, scope and timing. No bots, no templates, no auto-responders.