amber notebook

the idea

Amber Notebook turns the whole birthday site into a well-used notebook. the page is rice paper ruled into a faint graph, the words are written in dark sumi ink, the cards are kraft and cream stock, and one colour, amber, goes on everything you can press. it's calmer than the sticker look, more grown-up, and it still feels made by hand: the sort of notebook someone has carried around for a year and filled with the people they like.

the sticker rule stays, so friends' cards are still warm die-cut stickers with a white rim, an ink line and a hard shadow. what changes is the paper they're taped into and the pen they were written with. the look speaks in two voices: stickers shout (a few words, in caps, like the birthday person's name) and chalk measures (the countdown and the card count sit in a dark ink chip with paper-coloured numbers, like a figure written on a blackboard).

the palette

six colours, each with one job. amber is the accent: buttons, the name tabs on friends' cards, the wordmark. a vermilion seal marks stamps and section titles, and draws the red margin rule down the nav. key cyan is for anything you can press that isn't the main action. tea jade means done. vinyl indigo fills the love meter. turmeric is the masking tape.

every word is dark ink on light paper, and every colour pair on the page is checked for contrast, so the quieter palette never costs readability. amber comes with four checked alternatives, persimmon, celadon, periwinkle and peony: pick one and the buttons, the name tabs and the scrollbar's tab all follow it.

the binder (the nav)

the nav is a binder. across the top of every page sits one strip of notebook paper with a row of punched holes along its edge and a vermilion margin rule. the pages are written after the margin like a ledger (front page, leave a card, the board, the island, the festival), and each one has a coloured index tab hanging under the strip: amber, cyan, jade, indigo, turmeric. the page you're on gets its name in a small seal and a taller tab. hover over another page and key cyan wipes in behind it.

on a phone the strip becomes a three-column ledger of index cards, and the pages that don't fit are filed under more pages: a sheet torn out of the binder, holes down its left edge, each row a page name with a dotted leader running to its tab.

the scrollbar

the scrollbar is a strip of ruled paper, blue lines every few pixels and a doubled red margin line on the page side, with an amber index tab for a thumb. the tab is squared off like a real index tab, a little chunkier than usual so the detail reads, with a punched hole at its middle. it turns key cyan under the pointer and vermilion while you drag, and it follows whichever accent the host picked.

small boxes, like the message box in the card maker and the island's menu, get a thinner tab without the hole. Firefox draws scrollbars in a single colour, so there it's a plain dark-amber tab on the paper: same idea, fewer details.

page by page

• the front page: the birthday person's name as a big amber sticker, the little facts under it on strips of masking tape, and a section divider that tears along a perforation instead of being cut.
• the card maker: the seven steps become numbered index tabs, and a finished step gets a tick.
• the board: every card taped onto the graph paper with turmeric and vermilion tape. the tidy button says "square them up".
• the festival: each game's best scores written on a strip of ledger paper.
• the island's menu: a ruled notebook page with punched holes down its spine.
• a missing page: "this page got torn out", with a way back to page one.

who it suits

the scientist, the engineer, the friend whose planner has a colour code and whose margins are full of tiny arrows. the journal keeper. a partner who'd rather have something warm and calm than something loud. it suits a 30th as well as a 21st, and it suits a long-distance birthday, where a notebook of everyone's words feels like the right thing to send.

the island itself stays the same paper-cutout world whichever look the site wears, so walking around feels the same. everything friends left is the same too: a look changes how the site is dressed, never what's in it.