What I Do
Most studios do one of these. I do all of them, which means the website, the brand, the photography and the marketing finally pull in the same direction.
Web Design & Build
Bespoke, fast, design-led websites and web apps. No templates, no agency runaround.
Graphic Design
Brand identities, menus, print and editorial, with two decades behind the pen.
Commercial Photography
Food, interiors, product and brand photography that earns the booking.
Marketing & Infrastructure
Strategy, ads, social and local SEO, plus the systems, sourcing and tools that tie a business together.
Whatever the missing piece is, I build it.
I am a designer and photographer by trade, but the thing clients keep me around for is broader than that: an engineering mind paired with a designer's eye. When something in your setup is broken, slow or simply does not exist yet, I work out how to fix it and then go and do it, rather than handing you off to a specialist who charges a fortune and does not know your brand.
“We can't find anyone to print this properly.”
I source the right printer, prep the files and manage the run end to end.
“These two systems just won't talk to each other.”
I wire them together so the data flows on its own, no copy-paste.
“Our new menu doesn't look right.”
I redesign it so it reads cleanly, sells the right dishes and matches the brand.
“We need a small tool that doesn't exist yet.”
I build it, host it and keep it running, without a developer on retainer.
Selected Work
All six sitesThree builds, three very different briefs. Mostly Southampton hospitality, and the same hands on the website, the brand and the photos, which is rather the point.
Padharo
An award-winning vegetarian Indian restaurant. The food is careful, so the site had to be too. Reservations, menus, and room for the photography to work. Visit site
Visit Site
Ennio's
A waterfront Italian institution: restaurant, bar and boutique hotel in one building, and one site holding it all together without breaking a sweat. Visit site
Visit Site
Ryan Stanikk
My own photography portfolio. Image-first, fast and quiet about everything else, because the pictures are the pitch. Visit site
Visit Site
One person. The whole brand.
I'm Ryan Stanikk, a Southampton designer, photographer and web developer running Kombu as a one-person studio.
In Japanese cooking, kombu is the ingredient you never see, the quiet foundation that makes everything around it better. That is roughly the idea here: the base layer a business is built on, kept in one place instead of farmed out across a chain of agencies.
Two decades of graphic design, fifteen years behind the camera, and a tendency to just build the thing rather than charge you to wait for it.
Currently working with
Tell me what's not working.
Tell me what you are trying to do and I will tell you, honestly, how I would do it, and whether I am even the right person for the job.