Studio
Aktays is an independent design studio based in Istanbul, working with founders, product teams and marketing leads who care about the details most people skip.
The studio exists because of a pattern we kept seeing from the inside of larger agencies: the people who won the work were rarely the people who did it. By the time a project reached the team building it, the thinking that made it good had been summarised into a deck and lost.
So we built the opposite. Everyone who sits in your first call stays on the project until it ships. There is no account layer, no handover, no junior team quietly inheriting your budget.
That decision has a cost, and we would rather be honest about it: we can only take on about six projects a year. We turn down more work than we accept, and when we are not the right studio for something we will say so and point you somewhere better.
We work in English, Turkish and Arabic, mostly remotely, and we have shipped in nine countries. Istanbul is where we are; it is not a constraint on where you are.
Projects a year
Average reply time
Countries shipped to
Work done in-house
The brief you arrive with is your best guess at the problem. Our first job is to test it, which sometimes means telling you it is wrong in week one. That conversation is uncomfortable and it is the most valuable thing we do.
A demo every Friday, in a real browser, from the second week. Polished reveals at the end of a month protect the designer, not the client. Early and rough gives you time to change your mind while it is still cheap.
Static mockups lie about motion, about long text, about slow connections and small screens. We design in the browser as early as we can, so what you approve is what ships.
Accessibility, performance and content structure are decided before anything is styled. Retrofitting them costs more and produces worse work than treating them as the brief.
We are not trying to make ourselves indispensable. Every project ends with documentation and a system your team can extend without us. Coming back should be a choice, not a dependency.
Four phases, weekly demos, and something working in front of you long before the end.
We talk to your team, your customers and your data before opening a design file. No workshops for their own sake; just the questions that change what gets built.
The problem, narrowed to something a small team can solve, written on one page. If it does not fit on a page, we do not understand it well enough yet.
Design and build together in two-week loops. Real screens in a real browser every Friday. You redirect us while redirecting is still cheap.
We ship it, watch it, and stay four weeks to fix what the first thousand users find. Then documentation, and a handover meant to actually be used.
Four disciplines, deliberately overlapping, all in-house.
Tell us what you're making and roughly when you need it. If we're not right for it, we'll say so and suggest someone who is.