Original or nothing
Every site is drawn from an empty file. No purchased themes, no licensed templates, no borrowed layouts. The work is yours outright, with no third-party claim attached to it.
About · The practice
Seven years
bending code.
Bent Codes started in a bedroom in Little Rock. No agency connections, no trust fund, no clients waiting — just a kid who taught himself to code and refused to use a template.
Little Rock, AR
01 — The story
Why the name
is literal.
I first held a keyboard at age 3. By 10, I was messing with technology full-time — taking things apart, figuring out how they worked, building stuff nobody asked for. By the time I picked up code a few years later, I already had the mindset: if something exists, I can learn to build it.
From 2019 to 2024, it was freelance work and passion projects — building for fun, learning a whole lot in between. Graphic design came first, then web design, then the engineering to make it all real. I graduated from Little Rock Central High School in 2025 and turned what had been a hobby into a real practice.
The studio is deliberately one person. Not because scale is impossible, but because the thing clients get is a single continuous judgement running from art direction through to the last line of CSS. The person who designs it writes the code — no hand-offs, no translation loss.
0Years web design
0Years graphic design
0Years in technology
02 — Trajectory
Seven years,
plainly stated.
No overnight arc. Every year added something real.
2016 · First spark
Started tinkering with technology at 10 years old — taking things apart, learning how they worked, building things nobody asked for.
2019 · Code & design
Picked up graphic design and web development. Started freelancing for fun — building sites for anyone who'd let me, learning a whole lot in between.
2019–2024 · The grind
Years of freelance work and passion projects. Dropped page builders, learned to write everything by hand, studied motion and interaction design. Built the toolkit that underpins every project today.
2024 · First 10 shipped
Sent out the first 10 real websites to real clients. The work started speaking for itself — quality over quantity, every time.
2025 · Graduated
Graduated from Little Rock Central High School. Turned years of self-taught craft into a real practice.
2025–2026 · Bent Codes
The practice named, the standard set. Luxury quality at honest prices — every site custom-built from an empty file.
The fold
A bend has to be planned before the first cut. Interfaces are no different.
03 — Principles
Six rules,
never bent.
Everything else is negotiable. These are the terms of the practice.
Restraint over spectacle
One accent, two typefaces, generous space. Luxury is what remains after everything unnecessary has been removed — not what gets added at the end.
Speed is courtesy
A slow site tells the visitor their time is cheap. Budgets are set before the build and defended through it, on real mid-range hardware rather than a developer's laptop.
Motion with physics
Nothing appears or vanishes. Entries ease out, exits ease in, hovers resolve in 180 milliseconds, and every effect has a reduced-motion equivalent.
Accessible by default
AA contrast, keyboard paths, visible focus, semantic structure. Not a compliance exercise — simply the difference between a site that works and one that only looks like it does.
One hand, start to finish
The person who directs the design writes the code. No translation loss, no hand-off, no explaining the intent to someone who was not in the room.
04 — Toolkit
What the studio
actually runs on.
A short list, deliberately. Tools are chosen for longevity — anything that would strand a client if a company folded is excluded.
- Markup & style
- Semantic HTML, modern CSS with custom properties, container queries, scroll-driven animation
- Scripting
- Vanilla JavaScript first; React with Vite where an application genuinely warrants it
- Motion
- Native CSS timelines, Canvas 2D, WebGL for set-piece moments
- Commerce
- Shopify storefront APIs and headless commerce front ends
- Content
- Headless CMS with editor-friendly schemas and live preview
- Design
- Figma libraries mirroring production tokens one-to-one
- Quality
- Lighthouse, axe, real-device testing on mid-range Android and older iPhones
- Delivery
- Git, CI checks, staging environments, versioned releases
Vouches
Nyerere Billups, Sr. · The Growfessor, Founder & Owner · Nyemoji Institute
05 — Fit
Who this is for.
A good fit
- Brands with a real craft, product or archive behind them
- One decision-maker who can approve a direction
- Appetite for a distinctive direction over a safe one
- Timelines measured in weeks, not days
- Respect for performance and accessibility as standards
Probably not
- Committee approval with five competing opinions
- A launch needed inside a fortnight
- A brief that begins "make it look like this site"
- Cheapest-bid procurement
- Design by dashboard metrics alone
Two commissions open · Q4 2026