Horny Toad
Studios.
Handle with interest. He is not fragile.
- Independent
- One person. No account managers, no handoffs, no chain of command between you and the work.
- Santa Fe born
- Designed at 7,200 feet, for businesses that work in the dirt and sell to people with taste.
- Detail obsessed
- Kerning at 3am. A 40-millisecond easing argument with myself. The reason it looks expensive.
- Business minded
- I run a service business of my own, so the site gets judged on booked jobs, not on compliments.
- Slightly unconventional
- The mascot is a lizard that squirts blood from its eyes. There was never going to be a stock photo of a handshake.
Built by
Lake Schellstede.
Horny Toad Studios is the independent design practice of Lake Schellstede — rooted in Santa Fe, working with businesses that do things their own way.
I run a service business of my own. That is the part most designers are missing: I know what it feels like to watch a lead go cold because nobody answered the text, and I know that a website is judged in the truck at 7am, not in a design review.
So the work goes both ways. The front is designed to be impossible to ignore — the type, the motion, the photography, the parts that make a small company look like the best one in the state. Behind it sits the plumbing that catches the lead, answers it in under a minute, files it where you will find it and follows up when you forget to.
You work directly with me, from the first conversation to the finishing touches. There is nobody to hand you off to, which is the entire reason to hire a studio this size.
Five things
I actually believe.
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01
Restraint is the expensive part
Anyone can add. Deciding what not to build, not to animate and not to say is the whole discipline, and it is what separates a site that looks costly from a site that looks busy.
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02
One idea per screen
If a visitor has to choose between four equally loud things, they choose none of them. Every screen gets one job and a clear next move.
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03
Proof beats adjectives
A photograph of your own crew, a number you can defend, a review in a customer’s own words. All of it outperforms the word premium.
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04
Speed is a design decision
A gorgeous site that takes four seconds on a phone in a truck is a broken site. Performance gets designed in, not optimised afterwards.
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05
The site is half the system
What happens after the form is submitted decides whether the site made money. I build both halves or the work is not finished.
Since 2024 · Santa Fe, New Mexico