Fighting maintenance papercuts

We've all seen it before. A super polished website on launch day. But in the months after, quick, makeshift updates pile up and slowly chip away the quality.

We recently took another step towards our clients' autonomy and shipped a mini app that streamlines production of the most commonly updated website assets.

Team photos

For the Ardent Ventures' team page, we designed stylised portraits using dithering filters and a four-colour palette that adds warmth against the site's predominantly blue tones.

But every new Ardent hire shouldn't mean a ticket back to us for a matching portrait. The workflow: upload a photo, pick a color palette, and get a portrait with the right filters, resolution, and ratio for the website. Ardent can onboard someone on Monday and have their photo on the site the same day, no designer needed.

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How the portraits are made

Multiple processing layers turn any photo into a consistent, site-ready portrait.

Each upload goes through a fixed sequence. First, background removal isolates the subject. The image is then desaturated to black and white, followed by a contrast push to 300% and brightness to 200% to flatten the tonal range into hard light and shadow. An 8×8 dithering pass using Paper Design's shader adds the halftone-like texture.

Processing steps

  • Background removal
  • Desaturation to 0% saturation
  • Contrast 300%, brightness 200%
  • 8×8 dithering via Paper Design shader (1px size, 1 color step)

The final output composites four layers:

Layer stack (top to bottom)

  • Selected palette color — Plus Darker blend mode
  • Processed B&W photo (background removed)
  • Dithered image
  • White background

Available palette colors:

  • #C8D6F0
  • #CCCBDA
  • #DAD3B6
  • #CBDACE

Output is always cropped to a square, centered on the face, at a fixed resolution ready for CMS upload. Same framing, same treatment, regardless of the source photo.

Logos that behave

Logos appear across Ardent's portfolio page, on featured cards and on hover. Adding a new portfolio company through the CMS is easy, but getting the logo to look right next to every other logo is not.

Every logo comes with different visual weight, proportions, native colors. Some are heavy wordmarks, others are light icons. Without adjustment, some feel oversized, others disappear. And when the colors clash with the site's palette, the whole page starts to feel inconsistent.

We made a logo fit generator that normalises sizing so the visual weight stays consistent everywhere a logo appears and converts any color to match Ardent's brand navy. Upload any logo, get a clean, portfolio-ready version that sits well next to everything else. Another thing the client can handle on their own without asking for help.

The long game

Neither tool was in the original scope. No brief, no line item. They came from thinking about what happens after we part ways. How long the work holds up when nobody's maintaining it. Where the bottlenecks will show up. That's what we keep looking for.

Last edited on May 05, 2026 by

Anna Gwóźdź