pixel party

the idea

Pixel Party dresses the birthday site as an 8-bit arcade party, played on a bright screen instead of a dark one. the page is off-white, like a monitor that has just warmed up, with a faint pixel grid drawn across it, soft scanlines running sideways and a glassy sheen along the top. it reads as a screen at a glance, and every word still sits dark on light, so nothing is harder to read than it would be on paper.

everything that can be a square is one. outlines are one chunky pixel thick, corners step in a pixel at a time instead of curving, and shadows fall down and to the right in hard little steps. even the motion is pixel-shaped: buttons and tabs lift a step or two when you point at them, they never glide. the sticker rule stays underneath, so every card still has its white rim, its ink line and its hard shadow; they're just built out of very large pixels now.

friends' cards become pixel windows: a thick ink frame with stepped corners, like a dialog box in an old game, a dithered shade in one corner and a pixel name tab across the top. the tape that holds them down is notched square at both ends and dotted like a sprite, and the board stops looking like a wall of notes and starts looking like a screen full of saved games.

the palette and the type

the colours are the bright, flat ones a small palette of pixels does best, each with one job. cherry goes on everything you can press: the big buttons, the name tabs on friends' cards, the site's name and the page you're on. coin yellow is the tape, the coins and the labels. level-up green means done, and fills every loading bar in segments, like a health bar. sky blue marks keys and prompts, combo orange does stamps and titles, and a deep plum fills the love meter. all of it sits on screen white paper and cartridge grey card stock, with dark ink for every word.

every colour pair on the page is checked for contrast, so a loud palette never costs readability. cherry comes with four checked alternatives: turbo orange, laser lime, joystick blue and pixel violet. pick one and the buttons, the name tabs, the page you're on and the scrollbar's bar all follow it. the colours friends pick for their blob become six arcade colours too: cherry, combo orange, coin yellow, level-up green, sky blue and pixel violet.

• Pixelify Sans for the headlines, the menu and the buttons: a real pixel face, set in capitals with a white rim and a stepped ink shadow, like the title on a start screen.
• Nunito for everything you read at length, so a long message never turns into a squint.
• Gochi Hand stays for what friends write by hand, so their cards still look like their notes.

the game menu (the nav)

the nav is a game menu: a pixel window across the top of every page, framed twice in ink with a white line between, and three pixel hearts sitting on its top edge like lives. the site's name is the game's title. the pages are a row of pixel tabs, start, insert a card, hall of fame, the island and the arcade, each with its own colour cap. point at a tab and it lifts a step while a little arrow cursor jumps to it. the page you're on is filled cherry, and its cursor blinks, right where you'd look for it on a title screen.

on a phone the menu becomes a small screen of its own: the title on top, then a row of three tabs and a row of two, with the cursor blinking inside the tab you're on. the last tab says extras, and opens another pixel window with the arcade and the music switch inside. on the front page the little cake in the corner becomes a pixel cake with a lit candle, since the big headline already says whose birthday it is.

the scrollbar

the scrollbar is a health bar. its thumb is a squared-off bar in the site's accent with an ink outline, a white pixel shine down one side, a darker edge down the other, and thin ticks across it every few pixels, so it reads as segments of health. it rides an empty bar of faint slots. it turns coin yellow under the pointer and level-up green while you drag, as if you'd just picked up a heart, 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 bar on a clear groove. Firefox draws scrollbars in a single colour, so there it's a dark cherry strip on the white: same idea, fewer pixels.

page by page

• the front page: the birthday person's name in big pixel capitals, a line above it that says "press start" with a blinking block cursor, and the line under it in a dialog box with a blinking arrow in its corner, the way a game asks you to read on. a cursor points at the button that starts a card, the little facts are chips in five arcade colours, and the section dividers are a dotted row of pixels with a pixel heart in the middle.
• the card maker: the steps become numbered pixel blocks, the boxes to write in are a pale screen blue, and every button is a chunky pixel button that presses down a step at a time.
• the board: renamed the hall of fame, with every card a pixel window and the card count next to a coin that flips over now and then. the tidy button says "snap to grid", and "scramble them" puts them back.
• the festival: the arcade in the nav, each game's best scores on a little screen with scanlines, and a new best gets a coin-yellow sparkle that flashes a few times. every loading bar fills in green segments.
• the island: the menu opens as a pause screen with scanlines, the intro calls the birthday person player one, and hugs pop up as +100 LOVE, LEVEL UP! and CRITICAL HUG!
• a missing page: "this level is empty", a broken pixel heart with two dizzy sparkles, and a button back to start.

calm when it needs to be

the blinking is the one bit of motion the look adds, and it respects the reduced-motion setting on the device. with it on, every cursor stops blinking and stays lit, the coin stops flipping, the tabs and buttons stop jumping when you point at them, and everything holds still exactly where it is. it's still a pixel party, just a quieter one.

who it suits

the gamer, first: the friend with the high scores, the one who still remembers the cheat codes, the person whose birthday plans always end with everyone holding a controller. the site already has 12 mini-games in its festival, so a look that dresses the whole thing as an arcade is a natural fit; see them all on the games page. it's also for the retro fan who misses chunky pixels and bleepy menus, and for a games night, where the site goes up on the big screen and everyone takes a turn.

the island keeps its own paper-cutout world whichever look the site wears, so walking around feels the same; the look reaches its menu and the words that pop up. what friends left doesn't change either: every note, doodle, photo and clip is exactly as they made it, because a look changes how the site is dressed, never what's in it. compare every look side by side on themes, or see a shinier take on a game menu in glossy valley.