garden party

the idea

Garden Party lays the birthday site out like an afternoon party on the lawn. the page is cream linen with a fine weave, a little blush light on one side and butter sunshine on the other, and a hint of green grass under the last line of every page. friends' cards are scalloped like the edge of a doily and stitched round the inside, and gingham ribbon holds them down at the corners. it's elegant without being stiff: the sort of party where someone has ironed the tablecloth and someone else has brought far too many cakes.

the sticker rule still holds underneath, so every card keeps its ink outline and its hard little shadow, and the notes, doodles and photos friends leave sit exactly where they always do. what changes is the table they're laid on. headlines are set in a soft, slightly wonky serif instead of sticker capitals, a pressed flower fades into the corner of the page where the sticker look keeps its coffee ring, and the section dividers are a running stitch with a peony sewn on.

the palette

eight colours, picked from the flower beds, each with a job. cream linen is the page and sage card is the stock half the cards are cut from. peony pink is the accent: the main buttons, the name tabs on friends' cards, the site's name at the top. fern green stamps things and titles them, butter is the gingham ribbon and the highlighter, lavender marks the keys and prompts you can press, spring leaf means done (it's the scrollbar's leaf too), and a deep violet fills the love meter.

every word is dark ink on a light ground, and every colour pair on the page is checked for contrast, so the soft palette never costs anyone their reading. peony comes with four checked alternatives, marigold, poppy, sage and hydrangea: pick one on the site's design page and the buttons, the name tabs and the wordmark all follow it. friends choosing a colour for their blob pick from six garden colours too: peony, butter, fern, lavender, spring leaf and rosehip.

the type

• Fraunces for the headlines: a soft old-style serif with a little wobble in it, outlined in ink with a fern-green offset, like a seed catalogue printed in two colours. the names on the seed packets are printed in it too, in plain ink.
• Caveat for the handwriting: card messages, captions and the notes friends scribble in the margins.
• Nunito for everything you read at length, from the buttons to the small print.

headlines keep the case they were written in, so the board's title and the line on a missing page read like an invitation rather than a shout. friends' names sit on peony tabs at the top of their cards in small engraved capitals, like place cards down a long lunch table.

the seed packets (the nav)

the nav is a rack of seed packets standing on a linen runner with a scalloped hem and a line of stitching. every page is a paper packet with a crimped top, and under the crimp its picture: a band of the page's own colour with a strip of lawn along its foot, two little buds and, big in the middle, the page's flower. there's a peony for the front gate, a daisy for bring a card, a tulip for the bouquet, a fern for the island and a sprig of lavender for lawn games, each name printed underneath in the headline serif. the packets lean a little, the way they do in a rack by a shop till. point at one and it straightens up and lifts out of the rack, its paper turns white and its flower nods. the page you're on stands up taller still, white, with a sprout growing out of its top. a peony is pinned beside the site's name, and on the front page it stands in for the cake.

on a phone the packets shrink to a row of five across the top of the screen: the first four pages plus more packets, a packet of seeds, which opens a gingham napkin with a stitched hem holding the rest of the pages, laid on their sides, and the music switch. on bigger screens the music switch closes the row as a leaf-green pill with a running stitch round its inside, like the buttons; on a tablet or a small laptop it keeps just its note and its arrow.

the scrollbar

the scrollbar is a climbing vine. its groove is a strip of pale linen with a thin green stem winding down it and a leaf on every bend, and the thumb is a single willow leaf with a pale midrib, outlined in ink. it turns fern green under the pointer and takes the site's accent colour while you drag it, so with peony picked, the leaf blushes pink as it climbs.

small boxes, like the message box in the card maker and the island's menu, get a slimmer leaf on a plain groove. Firefox draws scrollbars in a single colour, so there it's a plain dark-green thumb on the linen: the same idea, with fewer details.

page by page

• the front page: the birthday person's name in big peony letters, a sprig beside the invitation line, and any little facts about them written on garden plant markers.
• the card maker: the seven steps become seeds, and the one you're on sprouts. finished steps turn leaf green with a tick.
• the board: renamed the bouquet, every card scalloped, stitched and tied down with gingham ribbon. the tidy button says "arrange the bouquet", and "let it grow wild" scatters them again.
• the festival: twelve booths and a row of arcade cabinets, set out on the lawn.
• the island: the menu opens on a scalloped card, and hugs pop up as +100 LOVE, IN FULL BLOOM and PICKED WITH LOVE.
• a missing page: "nothing's growing here yet", a spilled seed packet with one seed already sprouting, and a way back to the front gate.

who it suits

the plant parent, whose windowsill is a jungle and who has a name for every cutting. the elegant grown-up who would rather have linen than glitter. a spring or summer birthday, a garden lunch, an afternoon with a long table outside and a cake on a stand. it suits a 40th as well as a 70th, and it's a lovely fit for a birthday kept at a distance, where a garden full of everyone's words is the next best thing to being there.

whichever look a site wears, the island stays its paper-cutout self, and every card, photo and clip friends left stays exactly as they left it. a look changes the tablecloth, never what's on the table.