WEB DESIGN · DUBAI · UAE
I'm Emad Yahya — a freelance web designer in Dubai who designs directly in code: typography, layout, motion and art direction, shaped screen by screen for one brand. No purchased templates, no theme look, no page builders. If a competitor can buy your design for $60, it was never your design.
In 2026 three brand sites I designed went live: LKYOOB, a private-residences studio set like a printed portfolio; UNHID, a boutique luxury developer whose site opens with a cinematic video gate; and THE GROE, a creative agency whose hero is 16,000 interactive particles assembling the brand mark. Three completely different visual languages — because the design came from each brand, not from a theme.
Good web design is not picking a nice font — it is a chain of decisions that all point the same way. For LKYOOB the decision was restraint: serif display type that reads like print, whitespace treated as material, motion slowed until it feels like turning pages. For UNHID it was subtraction: every element either adds quiet or adds noise, and noise stayed out of the build. For THE GROE it was the opposite instrument — an interactive particle field as proof of craft, because an agency selling creativity cannot prove it with paragraphs.
That range is the point. A template gives every brand the same answer. I start from what your brand needs to say, then design the typography, palette, grid and motion that say it — and nothing else survives the process.
Most projects split the work: a designer hands mockups to a developer, and quality leaks in the handoff — spacing drifts, motion gets cut, the design that was approved is not the site that ships. I am both halves, so what you approve is literally what goes live.
This page is about the design practice. If your project is platform-heavy — booking systems, CRMs, HR platforms, dashboards — start from my freelance web developer page instead: same person, different discipline. And if your brand needs Arabic, bilingual Arabic-English design is its own craft with its own page.
A template carries someone else's decisions. It was designed for nobody in particular, which is why sites built on one feel familiar in the worst way — your brand wearing borrowed clothes. The details that make a site feel considered live exactly where builder tools give you the least control: type rhythm, spacing, easing curves, how an image is cropped at each breakpoint.
Every site I ship is designed and coded from scratch in React and TypeScript. That is not a purity ritual — it is the only way the design decisions stay yours all the way to production.
Design scope sets it: how many screens need composing rather than repeating, how far the motion goes, whether you arrive with brand assets or need the type, palette and grid decided from scratch, and whether the site runs in one language or two. Working solo means no studio overhead riding on top of the estimate. Send the brief and the number comes back in writing within 24 hours — yours to walk away from.
Both, deliberately. Every site I ship is designed and built by the same person, so nothing is lost in a handoff. This page covers the design practice — visual identity, typography, motion, art direction. For platform and systems work, see my freelance web developer page.
We move in stages instead of saving everything for one reveal: the type system and hero direction first, then the remaining screens once that language is settled. Because I design in the browser, every round is a live page you open on your own phone and laptop, and your notes go straight into the same build you just looked at rather than into a document to be re-drawn later. Changes are expected at each stage — a screen is finished when you have watched it move and said so.
It means the decisions are made for your brand rather than inherited: the type pairing, the colour, the grid, the spacing rhythm, the easing on every transition — chosen for you and written by hand in React and TypeScript. A template is a layout drawn before your brand existed, and it asks the brand to fit inside it. If you already have brand assets — logo, colours, fonts, photography — they set the direction and I extend them onto the web; if you do not, the type system, palette and grid are settled as part of the design work.
Yes — a redesign starts the same way as a new build: what should this brand look and feel like, and what is the current site failing to say? Your content and URLs are carried over carefully so you keep what already works while the design starts clean.
A campaign landing page comes together in 1–2 weeks. A brand or corporate site takes 2–4 weeks, and most of that sits early, while the type, palette and motion language are being settled. Heavier custom interaction or a second language stretches it past that. Those are the windows my 2026 client sites actually shipped in.
Arabic gets designed, not mirrored. As a native speaker I pick an Arabic face that sits comfortably beside the Latin one, set line height and spacing for Arabic's own rhythm, and compose the page right-to-left from the first screen instead of flipping a finished English layout at the end. Bilingual work has its own page here if that is the centre of your project.
Emad Yahya — portfolio · emaadyahya4@gmail.com · WhatsApp +971 566 392 647