Reading comes first
Typography, hierarchy and pacing are the product — decoration is not. If it doesn't help someone read, it doesn't ship.
About us
A small studio with a publishing obsession.
Duet Ventures was founded in 2019 on a simple observation: most digital books and websites are assembled, not designed. We do the second thing.
Est. 2019
4 seniors, 0 account managers
40+ publishers & studios
100% on-time record
Why we exist
Production, treated as the product.
Publishers were shipping ebooks that embarrassed their print editions. Studios were launching websites that buried their work under templates. Both problems have the same cause — production treated as an afterthought — and the same fix: craft applied from the first day.
Our first client was an indie press with three broken EPUB files and a launch date five weeks out. We rebuilt the files, hit the date, and wrote them a checklist so it wouldn't happen again. That project set the pattern for everything since: fix it properly, deliver it on time, and leave the client more capable than we found them.
We keep the team deliberately small. Every project is handled by senior people from kickoff to launch; nothing is handed down a chain. That's why we can promise fixed quotes and keep a 100% on-time record — there is no one to lose the plot between you and the work.
What we believe
Four values we actually use.
Not poster words — these are the tests every deliverable passes before it leaves the studio.
Fixed quotes, kept promises
You know the cost and the date before we begin. In seven years, neither has slipped once.
Standards matter
Valid EPUB, accessible markup, fast pages. Boring rigor is what makes remarkable results repeatable.
Handover, not lock-in
Documentation with every delivery. Your files, your code, your accounts — your project stays yours.
The honest comparison
What "small and senior" changes.
With Duet Ventures
A typical agency
Who does the work
The four seniors you meet on this page
Rotating juniors behind an account manager
Pricing
Fixed quote before kickoff, in writing
Hourly billing and estimates that drift
Timeline
Dated schedule in week one — kept 120 times straight
"It'll be ready when it's ready"
Progress
A staging link you can open any day of the week
One big reveal at the end
After launch
30 days of support plus plain-language docs
A maintenance contract you didn't ask for
The story so far
Seven years, in five chapters.
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2019
The studio opens
Founded in a spare room with one client — an indie press with three broken EPUB files and a launch date in five weeks.
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2021
First platform build
Northbound Journal trusts us with their full digital edition. Web work becomes half the practice overnight.
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2023
The four of us
The team reaches its permanent size: four seniors, no juniors, no account managers. We like it this way.
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2025
100th project ships
A hundred deliveries without a missed date. We celebrated quietly and updated the checklist that got us here.
-
2026
Today
A focused studio serving 40+ publishers and studios worldwide — still small enough that you work with the people who do the work.
7+
Years in practice
120+
Projects delivered
40+
Publishers & studios served
100%
On-time delivery rate
The team
Four people. No account managers.
You work directly with the people doing the work — flip a card to meet them.
Ada Wren
Founder & Creative Director
Flip for bio ↻
Tomás Ferreira
Lead Developer
Flip for bio ↻
June Okada
Editorial Designer
Flip for bio ↻
Marcus Hale
Production Manager
Flip for bio ↻
Working with us
What the first week feels like.
One point of contact
Marcus runs your project from kickoff to handover. No ticket queues, no "let me check with the team."
Same-day answers
Every email answered within one working day — usually within hours. Silence is a form of scope creep.
Your timezone, your tools
We work async-first and adapt to you: email, Slack or a shared doc. Meetings only when they earn their minutes.
EPUB 3
WCAG 2.2 AA
EPUBCheck
Lighthouse 95+
Hand-coded builds
Plain-language docs
Client words
What working with us is like.
★★★★★“Duet treated our magazine like it mattered. The new platform reads better than our print edition — and our subscribers noticed before we announced anything.”
★★★★★“Three vendors failed to convert our illustrated novel properly. Duet delivered a flawless file in two weeks and documented everything for our next title.”
★★★★★“They asked better questions than any agency we've worked with, then built exactly what the answers required. Our commission requests doubled.”
