Evidence before opinion
We interview your customers, read your sales inbox and study your analytics before we sketch anything. Taste settles ties; evidence settles arguments.
The studio
Small on purpose. Senior by design.
Paintbase Studio is a nine-person web design and development practice in the heart of Kuala Lumpur. We started in 2015 with a simple irritation: too many Malaysian businesses were paying agency prices for template work, delivered by juniors, defended with jargon.
So we built the opposite. Every project here is handled by people with at least eight years of practice. Every design decision has a reason you can interrogate. And every site we ship is measured against the only test that matters — did it move the numbers the client hired us to move?
What we hold to
Three habits that shape every project
Plain speech
Proposals in ringgit, timelines in weeks, trade-offs in sentences you can repeat to your board. If we cannot explain a recommendation simply, we have not finished thinking about it.
Finish properly
Launch is a milestone, not the finish line. Redirects, analytics, training and sixty days of corrections are part of the job — not an upsell.
Who does the work
The people you meet are the people who build
Two designers, three developers, a UX researcher, a content strategist, a project lead and a founder who still reviews every build before it ships. No account-manager relay race, no outsourced mystery layer.
- One project lead as your single point of contact from kickoff to handover
- Designers and developers in the same room, arguing early instead of patching late
- A researcher on every major project, because guessing is more expensive than asking
- Everything produced in-house in Kuala Lumpur — design, code, content structure
The road so far
A short history of a stubborn idea
- 2015Two freelancers merge their client lists and rent a corner of a shared office in Bangsar. First project: a site for a family-run hardware distributor that tripled its dealer enquiries.
- 2018The team reaches five. We formalise the research-first process after a project where customer interviews overturned everything the brief assumed.
- 2021Care plans launch, because sites we maintained were visibly outperforming sites we merely delivered. Ninety percent of active clients sign on within a year.
- 2023We move to Menara Hap Seng 2 and cap the studio at ten people — big enough for depth, small enough that nothing ships unseen.
- 2026One hundred and forty sites shipped. The oldest client from 2015 is still with us, on their third rebuild.
Meet us properly