La Chatte Noire is a small independent code consultancy and design studio based in Fukuoka, Japan. It was set up by Philippe Wittenbergh & partner late in the 20th century. We focus on front–end coding and development (CSS, HTML, graphics), providing advice on website concepts and evaluation of code and accessibility.

As a web design studio, we pay lots of attention to text presentation and its integration into a functional design. We believe websites should be about users first. Web standards, accessibility, progressive enrichment are part of the underlying philosophy. La Chatte Noire is often asked to provide support for smaller in-house teams don’t always have the expertise and time to attend and evaluate all the needs to serve the customers.

Prior to focussing on the web, La Chatte Noire also has built an extensive experience in print design and art–direction (leaflets and company brochures, calendars, posters).

For more information, feel free to contact us.

The creative lead of La Chatte Noire, Philippe Wittenbergh is a graphics and image creator, designer and web–site consultant. He graduated with a university degree in new media sociology, and studied photography. His photographic work (a sample can be viewed in this gallery) has been exhibited in various places in Europe, the US and Japan. It is characterised by an introspective investigation in the format of image poems, rhythmically driven by Jazz music.

For La Chatte Noire’s web–design work he is mostly focussed on presentation, structure and text matters: debugging and solving complex cross browser layout and formatting issues, building & optimising cascading stylesheets (CSS) and front–end html code. He is a regular contributor to mailing list such as CSS–D¹ and WebDesign–L, wrote multiple articles on subjects of webdevelopment (among them, co-authoring ‘On having layout’²). He maintains a more personal space at Empty Spaces³. He also contributes to various Open Source (web) applications such as Textpattern CMS⁴ and Gecko based webbrowsers (Camino⁵). When not otherwise busy with web work he has been designing calendars, postcards, posters, etc for a variety of clients.

1. CSS Discuss.
2. On having Layout (404, webarchive link)
3. Empty Spaces
4. Textpattern CMS
5. Camino Browser – see also this wiki page (this lovely browser died ages ago, unfortunately).