Ask better questions
Two weeks, fixed fee. We start with your support tickets and your cancellations, not your roadmap. The deliverable is a problem worth solving, in writing.
Counter
form
A design & engineering studio for the part of the product nobody draws — the space around the thing.
DisciplineProduct design × engineering
StandingSmall by design, senior by default
BasisRotterdam + remote, EU hours
StatusTaking Q3 briefs →
FIG. 02 — Manifesto
Most studios design the thing. We design the space around it — the empty state that teaches, the loading pause that respects you, the error that apologises like a person. The gap between screens is where trust is built — drawn on purpose, or not at all.
- ①We maintain a 40-page error-message style guide. It is the most-read document we own.
- ②Transitions are interface. We budget milliseconds the way you budget money.
- ③Trust is a rendering property. It ships or it doesn't.
FIG. 03 — Process
How a brief becomes a shipping product
Four plates, drawn to scale — ( keep scrolling )
Clickable by day ten
Deliberately unpolished. We test the idea, not the pixels — so nobody falls in love with a mock too early to change it.
Break it first
Real users, real constraints, bad Wi-Fi. We stress the prototype against the messiest day your customer will actually have.
Stay through launch
Our engineers land the code with your team. Then we watch what the product does — not what we hoped it would do — and adjust.
FIG. 04 — Selected work
Drawing register
Client names changed, work real. No metrics shown — metrics depend on everything.
A ledger interface for credit unions that reads like a passbook, not a dashboard. Designed with, and partially drawn by, the tellers who use it daily.
Prescribed exercises as a video-first PWA that patients actually open — built with clinic staff, stress-tested on a phone with a cracked screen.
A photography foundation's entire archive made browsable with two keys. The interface disappears; the negatives don't.
Municipal records redesigned to be legible to the people they are about — plain language, plain forms, one file per life event.
A schema editor where the schema is the interface — no property panels, no trees. Our engineers still argue about whether it counts as design.
FIG. 05 — Engagement, typical shape
Illustrative — every engagement is drawn from scratch
One team, one drawing, sixteen weeks
Discoverywk 0–3
Prototypewk 3–8
Hardeningwk 8–13
Ship & instrumentwk 13–16+
The bars are hatched like a section cut because that is exactly what this is: a cross-section of a typical engagement, not a promise. Your drawing will have its own dimensions.
FIG. 06 — Correspondence
Tell us what's missing →
drawings@counterform.studio — we reply within two working days with questions, not a deck. If your problem is small enough to be obvious, it's probably too small for us; if it can't be drawn yet, it's probably right.