seaside postcard

the idea

Seaside Postcard dresses the whole birthday site as post from somewhere sunny. the page is cream card stock, bleached a little at the top where the sun caught it and printed with a faint dot screen, like a holiday postcard that sat on a shelf for one summer too many. friends' cards become postcards: square-cut, cream or sand, taped up in rows, and each one franked with a navy postmark and a run of wavy lines beside the date it arrived.

everything else comes from the post office. the main buttons are edged in red and blue airmail stripes. a section break is a postmark and its wavy cancellation lines. the countdown to the big day turns into a departures board of three navy split-flap tiles. the STUCK! stamp that lands when a friend sends a card comes down in postmark navy, and even the one coffee-ring stain on the page is a faded postmark now. on the front page, "greetings from" is written by hand above the site's name, the way the old big-letter postcards did it.

the palette and the type

sea glass is the accent: the main buttons, the name tabs on friends' cards, the site's name and the stamp in the scrollbar. coral and postmark navy are the airmail pair, and navy also inks the postmarks, fills the love meter and lights the departures board. sunshine yellow is the tape and the highlights, lido blue marks things you can press, and beach grass means done. it all sits on postcard cream and dune sand, with dark ink for every word, and every colour pair on the page is checked for contrast.

sea glass comes with four checked alternatives: sunset coral, harbour blue, deckchair yellow and seashell pink. pick one and the buttons, the name tabs, the tag of the page you're on and the stamp all follow it. friends choosing a colour for their blob get six seaside ones: sea glass, coral, sunshine, lido blue, beach grass and seashell pink.

• Lilita One for the headlines: chunky block capitals in a white rim, with a navy shadow stepped out behind them like the lettering on an old souvenir postcard.
• Caveat for the handwriting: card messages, captions and that "greetings from", in a quick, loopy pen, sized up a touch so it stays easy to read.
• Nunito for labels, buttons and everything you read at length.

the luggage tags (the nav)

the nav is a length of twine strung across the top of every page, with each page hung from it on a luggage tag: home, send a card, mailbag, island and the pier. every tag has a clipped end, a reinforced eyelet with the string looped through it, a stripe of colour at the far end and its own slight lean, the way tags hang after a few airports. hover over one and it swings on its string. the page you're on turns sea glass and swings into place as you arrive.

the music switch hangs off the same twine as a little ticket, punched at the top. on a phone the tags wrap onto two lengths of string, and the pages that don't fit go under more stops: tap it and an airmail envelope opens, striped red and blue along its edges, with a stamp in its corner and the rest of the tags lying inside.

the scrollbar

the scrollbar is a postage stamp. the thumb has real perforated edges, a white paper margin, a thin printed frame and a sea glass face with two small waves at its middle, and it slides along a sand-coloured groove with a strip of airmail stripes on the page side. it turns sunshine yellow under the pointer and coral while you drag, and its face follows whichever accent the host picked.

small boxes, like the message box in the card maker and the island's menu, get a slim plain strip in an ink ring instead of the stamp. Firefox draws scrollbars in a single colour, so there it's a plain dark sea glass strip on the sand: same idea, fewer details.

page by page

• the front page: "greetings from" over the site's name in big sea glass capitals, any facts the host adds on a sheet of little stamps, and the countdown as a departures board.
• the card maker: the steps become stops on a dashed route, and its main buttons wear the airmail stripes.
• the board: renamed the mailbag, with every card a postcard and every date a postmark. the card count is stamped beside the title, the tidy button says "sort the post", and "tip the bag out" scatters them again.
• the festival: the pier, a run of booths and arcade cabinets. pick a game and chase a high score.
• the island: its menu card carries an airmail stripe along the top, and hugs pop up as SPECIAL DELIVERY, +1 POSTCARD and FIRST CLASS HUG.
• a missing page: "this page got lost in the post", under a coral stamp that says no such address, with a postcard whose address got smudged and a way back to the front.

who it suits

the traveller. the friend who lives far away. anyone whose people are scattered across a map and a few time zones. it suits a long-distance birthday best of all, where every card really did come from somewhere else, and a site full of postcards says what a shoebox of them would: we were all thinking of you, from wherever we were. it's warm enough for a parent's 60th and bright enough for a 21st.

the island itself stays the same paper-cutout world whichever look the site wears (the look reaches its menu and the words that pop up), 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. to see it beside the others, compare every look on themes.