About Bits&Letters
Are we just one guy? A whole team? Yes.
Bits&Letters is a website consultancy1 founded by David Demaree. David's a longtime design engineer2 and tech product leader who's helped build design infrastructure used by millions, at companies like Google and Adobe.
We have one of the industry's strongest networks of domain experts and delivery specialists. When you hire B&L for your project, we assemble a right-sized team around your specific needs. You're not paying for a big office full of sales reps or account managers, just for the folks who know what it takes to build your website.
Your website isn't just a brochure — it's a system.
A growing company's website is a content platform, sales asset, hiring signal, product surface, and operational system all in one. Treating it like a one-off design project is why so many redesigns start decaying the moment they ship.
Most web agencies are set up to launch sites. We’re set up to build sites that keep working — for your visitors, your editors, and the people responsible for what happens after launch day.
Bits&Letters isn't strictly a dev shop, a design studio, or a strategic consultancy — we're a hybrid of all three, and in our practice we aim to blend all of these holistically.
Rather than have a strategist make you a deck, that's handed off to a designer who makes mockups, which are handed off to a developer who builds the site, we aim to get into code as early as possible, and talk through design and tactical goals while looking at live prototypes.
If we said we're a digital agency, that'd imply a lot of things that go well beyond websites and the web platform. Full-service agencies offer stuff like marketing strategy, SEO, PPC, FTW, and BBQ. (OK, we made a couple of those up.)
These other agency services are important, and we know folks who do them really well who we can bring in per-project or refer you to depending on what you need.
In this house, we believe
The system matters more than the launch
Content models, CMS workflows, components, redirects, performance, and documentation determine whether a site lasts.
Design and engineering should happen together
Beautiful mockups are not enough if they break under real content, real browsers, or real workflows.
Editors are users too
A good website should be as usable for the internal team running it as it is for the visitors reading it.
Small senior teams beat handoff chains
The people scoping, designing, and building should stay close to the work from discovery through launch.
What's a design engineer?
Design engineers are, put simply, designers who code — specialists who are strong in both the creative and technical sides of making digital products and experiences.
In the olden days of the web, these folks were often just called "web designers." and they'd move freely back and forth between slicing image maps and other assets in Photoshop or Fireworks, and integrating those elements into production code.
Big Tech background. Boutique focus.
David Demaree
Owner & Principal
Bits&Letters is led by David Demaree — engineer, designer, product leader, and typography nerd. He's shaped platforms at Google, Adobe, Stripe, and Webflow; written a book (Git for Humans); and spoken around the world.
That experience matters because B&L projects sit at the overlap of brand, content, code, and product operations. We bring the judgment of large-platform work to websites that still need to feel personal, practical, and right-sized for the team running them.
Alumnus of
David has more than 25 years of design, dev, and product management experience
- Built first web sites in 1995; working professionally on the web since 2002
- Early engineer & product lead for Typekit, the original web font service acquired by Adobe
- Worked on adaptive color and typography in Google's Material Design system
- Led efforts to ship design tokens and component libraries at Webflow
- Part of the team that shipped Stripe Apps, allowing third parties to extend the Stripe dashboard
- Author of Git for Humans, a cult-favorite book about version control aimed at designers & writers, originally published by A Book Apart
- Featured speaker at web design and dev events in the U.S., Europe, and Australia
What our clients have to say
Our new website looks so good and is amazingly fast. This launch really made it feel like a new chapter starting for us.
David took the time to really understand my vibe, and delivered something professional that didn’t feel like a cookie-cutter template. He was easy to hop on the phone with, brought a ton of expertise, and gave me a site I’m proud to share as I work to grow my business.
David strikes that rare balance of design, creativity, and technical know-how, and made it easy for our team to move fast without sacrificing quality. He made the process of building and updating pages fun by creating templates and reusable components.
B&L helped us scale from our day-one build to a site that runs like it’s backed by a full design team. They gave us the systems, structure, and speed to keep up with growth—without adding overhead.
Good fit
We work best with teams who see the site as part of how the company runs.
For
- Growing companies whose site is becoming harder to manage
- Marketing and product teams that need durable content systems
- Buyers who value craft, speed, maintainability, and ownership
- Teams with a clear decision-maker and realistic investment range
Not for
- Cheap theme customization or purely cosmetic redesigns
- Projects where no one owns content and workflow decisions
- Teams looking for a large agency staffing model
- Builds where launch day matters more than what happens after