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Mikey Cabiles

Case study · Built in the open

This site

The most honest pitch I can make: my own site, taken apart on the table. Every choice — colour, type, the words and the silence between them — and the real reason it’s there. The argument and the proof, in one breath.

Five short chapters, in the order you’d actually build them. Read straight down, or jump to the one you came for.

Role
Everything
Year
2026
Built
By hand
Status
Live, honest
The mikeycabiles.com homepage hero — the studio wordmark over a dark, flash-lit portrait.

The homepage, as it shipsOne dark room · one accent · a loud name

Nº 01 The premise

Why my own site is the cruelest brief.

The site has to prove its own point

If I can’t make myself the obvious choice, why would you trust me with you?

I build the thing a business gets judged on — the presence that makes the right person stop shopping around. This page is where you call my bluff: no client to blame, no budget that ran dry, no committee that watered it down. Every call was mine, so every call’s on the record. The whole site has one job — reads like a magazine, closes like software — and here’s how.

Reads like a magazine. Closes like software.

Nº 02 The thinking

Built backward from the handshake.

One thing I want you to do

A site with five goals has none.

This one has a single job — get the right person to reach out — and every page is built backward from that handshake, not forward from a homepage. No screen tries to say everything; each does one thing and earns the next. The structure says the same: websites are the work, and ads, photography, video and social aren’t a buffet — they make the website land harder, nothing else. A brochure describes a business; this is built to move you.

Nº 03 The look

Felt in the first second, mostly without knowing why.

A gallery, not a billboard

People decide with their eyes — so the look does a lot of quiet work.

The whole site lives in one warmed dark room. It reads like a gallery, stepping back so the photography and the work carry the colour — then exactly one bright tone, the flame, and it only ever means one thing: do this. By your third scroll your eye has learned it. That’s not decoration; that’s me taking your hand.

#141416 Ink — the room
#1F1F22 Ink — lifted panels
#F2EFE9 Bone — the text
#D9D5CC Bone — body copy
#8C8A85 Muted — the small print
#FF4D00 Flame — the one accent
#661C10 Wine — warm bands
#C7A876 Gold — rare warmth
The whole palette, by jobEight tones · one of them shouts

Type talks before a word is read. Headlines are Anton — tall, tight, shouting in a whisper because I use it sparingly. The body is Atkinson Hyperlegible, and this one’s personal: I’m dyslexic, and it’s drawn so the letters that usually smudge — the b and the d, the l and the 1 — stay apart. Good body copy should disappear, so you absorb it without trying.

AntonHeadlines · the loud one
THE OBVIOUS CHOICE
Atkinson HyperlegibleBody · the way I read
People decide with their eyes, in seconds.
Bodoni ModaItalic · the aside
A style that inspires.
Space MonoThe small print · labels
Nº 03 · WEB · 2026
Four faces, and a scale that flexes with the screenAccessibility, baked in

And it’s all paced for skimmers: one idea per screen, then a full-bleed line that lands like a snare hit and resets you. Quiet, quiet, loud. No stock photos either — the second someone clocks one they stop believing you — so every frame is real and graded as one set.

Pretty is cheap. Taste is the moat.

Nº 04 How it talks

Warm, blunt, never markety.

It sounds like someone who means it

No synergy. No solutions. No fog.

The register is plain, a little blunt, sometimes a little too honest — the way I actually talk. Short lines do the lifting. A handful repeat across the whole site, so the brand has a spine you can quote back to me, and the rule under all of it is simple: talk about what you get, not how I work. Because when everyone in a category sounds the same, the only thing left to shop on is price — the one race you don’t want to win. So the copy refuses the safe line and says the real one.

Everyone else

“Welcome to our website. We provide quality solutions you can trust.”

Describes the business. Could belong to anyone.

This site

“Stop trying to beat the algorithm.”

Speaks to what you get. Could only be mine.

Safe vs. said out loudWhat you get, every line
Nº 05 Under the hood

The parts nobody notices — until they’re missing.

Built by hand, built to last

Confidence doesn’t fidget — and it doesn’t cut corners.

Motion comes first, and the rule is restraint: things settle into place as you scroll — small, calm moves that play once and then leave you alone, never a loop begging for attention. The one set-piece earns it: a statement that types itself out, letter by letter, as you reach it. Nothing important hides behind an animation, and if your device asks for less, the page just sits still.

The rest is the unglamorous stuff. Buying decisions now start in two places — a search box and an AI that speaks for you — so the site is written for both, with the studio’s facts kept in one spot so it can never contradict itself. Accessibility is baked into the same calls that make it convert, not bolted on at the end. And it’s all built by hand as plain, fast pages — the colour, type and spacing decided once and reused everywhere, so moving one setting moves the whole site. That’s how one person ships something that looks like a team made it.

What it’s built to do

The proof is the page

I won’t quote you numbers I haven’t earned yet — that’s the rule this whole studio runs on, and it bites hardest on my own site. What I can hand you is the thinking, in the open: a presence built backward from one human moment, in a system tight enough for one person to hold the line. The site makes the case — so I don’t have to.

Want one built like this?

If your work is better than your website lets on, that’s the gap I close. Founding-client builds start at $2,000, and I read every enquiry myself — reply within 24 hours.