01 / The studio
Small on purpose.
Senior by rule.
Eleven people in Paris, no account layer, no juniors on client work. The person you meet in the first call is the person who does the work, and the person who writes about it afterwards.
We kept watching good designs die in the hand-over.
Two of us spent eight years in agencies where one team drew the pages and another team, three floors down, built them. The site that shipped never looked like the file that was approved, and both teams blamed the other.
Synora exists to remove the floor between them. The designer writes the tokens. The engineer sits in the design review. The person who wrote the brief measures the result for ninety days after launch. It is a small idea, and it changes everything about how a project feels.
- Founded
- 2016
- People
- 11
- Launches
- 140
- Return clients
- 98%
- Median Lighthouse
- 100
- Countries shipped to
- 9
03 / Principles
Four opinions
we keep having.
Write before you draw
Every page starts as a sentence: what it is for, and the number it should move. The layout serves the argument. A beautiful page with nothing to say is a poster, not a website.
Design in the browser
From week two, reviews happen on a URL, on your phone, with your content. A static picture cannot describe a page that has to work at 380 pixels wide with a headline two words too long.
Budget before beauty
Weight, requests and Largest Contentful Paint are written into the proposal before design starts. The build fails if the homepage goes over. The design review stays about design.
Own what you paid for
The repository lives in your organisation from the first commit. There is no licence, no lock-in and no page builder. If we part ways, nothing breaks.
04 / The people
The talent.
Everyone here works on client projects and writes for the Journal. Nothing on this site is written by someone who has not shipped the thing they are describing.
- Lead
Julien Tanaka
Lead engineer, co-founder
Julien runs the engineering side of Synora. He writes about performance budgets, static-first architectures and the parts of a build that nobody puts in the proposal.
2 articles - Data
Clara Vidal
Head of analytics
Clara decides what we measure and how we read it. She writes about search, analytics without cookies, and the difference between a metric and a number.
0 articles - Cloud
Priya Raman
Cloud architect
Priya keeps the sites online and the editors calm. She writes about hosting, headless content models and the boring infrastructure decisions that prevent exciting incidents.
1 articles - Design
Maxime Laurent
Product designer, co-founder
Maxime leads design at Synora. He designs in the browser, argues for fewer pages and more typography, and writes about the decisions that make an interface feel considered.
3 articles
A senior designer or engineer runs your project from kickoff to launch. No account layer in between.
A shared board you can open any day. Every decision, every file, every demo recording lives there.
Each phase is quoted before it starts. If we get the estimate wrong, that is our problem, not yours.
05 / Timeline
Ten years,
one idea.
- 2016
- Julien and Maxime leave a large agency and open a two-desk studio in the 2nd arrondissement. First client: a bakery chain with eleven shops and no website.
- 2018
- First performance budget written into a proposal. The client wanted a hero video. The video shipped, on desktop only, and the argument became a method.
- 2021
- The last design file is delivered. Every project since has been designed in the browser. Clara joins and the 90-day measurement period becomes standard.
- 2023
- A ten-week build takes nineteen. We charge for ten, write a post-mortem, and add a line to the Discovery template: look at the data, not the description of the data.
- 2026
- Eleven people, four writing for the Journal every other week, and a written accessibility statement on every site we have launched since 2022.
Come and
meet us.
The two founders take every first call. Thirty minutes, no slides, and one question: what is the site for?
Book an intro