candy shop

the idea

Candy Shop dresses the birthday site as an old-fashioned sweet shop, the kind with a striped awning over the door and a wall of glass jars behind the counter. the paper is vanilla cream, the card stock is mint, and a few sprinkles have landed on the counter between the cards. friends' cards are held down with candy-striped ribbon instead of tape, and every name tab and button catches a little sugar glint, like a boiled sweet held up to the window.

it's sweet, but it's made with care, not sugar for its own sake. the sticker rule stays, so every card still has its white rim, its ink line and its hard shadow, and every word still sits dark on a light ground. what changes is the shop around them: the awning, the jars, the ribbons and the wrappers.

the palette and the type

five sweet colours, each with one job. strawberry goes on everything you can press: the main buttons, the name tabs on friends' cards, the wordmark and the awning. lilac marks stamps and titles. lemon drop is most of the ribbon, and the highlight behind a label. spearmint means done. blue raspberry is for keys and prompts. a deep grape fills the love meter, and all of it sits on vanilla cream paper and mint cream card stock.

every colour pair on the page is checked for contrast, so the pastels never cost readability. strawberry comes with four checked alternatives, sherbet, mint, lemon drop and toffee: pick one and the buttons, the name tabs, the awning's stripes and the scrollbar's sweet all follow it. the colours friends pick for their blob become six sweets too: strawberry, spearmint, lemon drop, lilac, blue raspberry and sherbet.

• Cherry Bomb One for the headlines: round, heavy and bouncy, like letters piped in icing.
• Nunito for the jar labels, the buttons and everything you read at length.
• Gochi Hand stays for what friends write by hand, so their cards still look like their notes.

the candy jars (the nav)

the nav is a shop front. a striped awning in strawberry and cream runs across the top of every page, its scalloped hem cut one scallop to a stripe. under it the pages stand on a pistachio shelf as a row of candy jars, the shop, wrap a card, the jar, the island and the fair, each one a striped label under a ribbed, glossy lid in its own colour. the page you're on has its lid popped open and its label tinted. hover over another jar and it lifts off the shelf while its lid rattles once.

on a phone the shelf holds five small jars, the first four pages plus more jars, which opens a striped paper bag with its top folded over: the rest of the jars are inside, with the music switch as a wrapped mint. on the front page the little cake in the corner becomes a wrapped strawberry sweet, since the big headline already carries the site's name.

the scrollbar

the scrollbar is a wrapped sweet: a pill in the site's accent colour with an ink outline, both ends crinkled like cellophane and twisted off with a dark band, and a stripe of sugar gloss down its side. it rides a peppermint-striped groove, cream with thin diagonal strawberry stripes. it turns spearmint under the pointer and lilac while you drag, and it follows whichever accent the host picked.

small boxes, like the card maker's message box and the island's menu, get a slimmer, plain sweet on a clear groove. Firefox draws scrollbars in a single colour, so there it's a deep strawberry strip on the cream: same idea, fewer details.

page by page

• the front page: the birthday person's name in big round letters, and the little facts under it wrapped as sweets in strawberry, spearmint, lemon, blue and lilac, twisted at both ends. the section dividers are striped ribbon with a lemon drop in the middle.
• the card maker: the step dots become gumballs, and the step you're on is a wrapped sweet. the boxes to write in are strawberry-milk pink.
• the board: renamed the sweet jar, with every card cream or mint, a dotted line of piped icing inside its edge and a ribbon across a corner. the card count hangs on a price tag, the tidy button says "put them on the shelf", and "tip the jar out" scatters them again.
• the festival: called the fair, a row of sweet stalls and arcade cabinets, and every loading bar is a peppermint stripe instead of a checkerboard.
• the island: the menu wears the awning's stripes along its top edge, and the intro card tells the birthday person to go and collect their hugs.
• a missing page: "this jar is empty", with a little drawing of an empty jar, its lid off, and a way back to the counter.

who it suits

kids, first. it's bright without being loud, the words stay big and easy to read, and it suits a 6th as well as a 12th. it's also for the sweet tooth of any age: the friend who always knows where the good biscuits are hidden, the one who turns up to every film night with a paper bag of sweets to share. and it's a natural for a pastel party, where the cake, the balloons and the site can all match.

the island itself stays the same paper-cutout world whichever look the site wears (the look reaches its menu and the words on its intro card), and every card, photo and clip friends left is exactly the same: a look changes how the site is dressed, never what's in it. compare every look side by side on themes.