Bibbiena, AR.
Since 2017.
Three people. All work in-house. Custom web design in the Casentino valley, Province of Arezzo, Tuscany.
TrueMake Designs opened in Bibbiena in 2017. The name came from a simple idea: websites that are made for something specific, rather than assembled from templates without a clear purpose.
Bibbiena sits at the head of the Casentino valley in the Province of Arezzo. It is a useful place to run a design studio — close enough to Florence and Arezzo to serve the businesses there, far enough away to work without the pace of a city agency. The pace difference matters. We take on fewer projects at any given time than a city agency our size would, and the work is better for it.
The Casentino is known for specific things: Camaldoli monastery, the Parco Nazionale delle Foreste Casentinesi, and — relevant to us — Fabriano paper, which has been made in this valley since the 13th century. There is something appropriate about running a design studio in a region where craft has been taken seriously for that long.
We have three people: Andrea handles creative direction and project management. Elena leads design. Marco leads development. All work is done in-house. We do not use outsourced contractors for client projects. When you hire TrueMake Designs, you are working with the people whose names appear on the website.
The clients we serve are mostly professional services firms, artisan businesses, hospitality operators, and creative practices across Tuscany and the surrounding regions. A number are in other parts of Italy. A small number are international. What they have in common is that they need design work that reflects the quality of what they actually offer — not generic agency output applied to their sector.
All project work is done in-house by our three-person team. We do not outsource to external contractors. When you hire TrueMake Designs, you work with us directly.
Three people.
Andrea founded TrueMake Designs in Bibbiena in 2017. He spent five years before that at digital agencies in Florence and Bologna — long enough to understand what makes clients frustrated with agencies and what they actually need from a project. He came back to the Casentino because the work is better here and the commute is non-existent.
Elena joined in 2019 after three years of freelance UX work across the Tuscany region. She leads all design work at TrueMake — from brand identity through to responsive component systems. Her background in UX before she moved into visual design means she asks questions about user flow that most visual designers skip entirely.
Marco is from Arezzo and has been building websites since 2014. He joined TrueMake in 2021 and is responsible for all development, performance, and technical quality. He has a particular focus on Core Web Vitals and the specific ways that a poorly-performing site costs businesses money in paid advertising and organic search.