sticker saga

the idea

Sticker Saga looks like a friend made it at 2am with a glue stick, a roll of washi tape and a fat marker. every surface is paper: butter-coloured pages with a faint dot grid, flecked kraft card stock, eraser-pink boxes to write in. on a wide screen the margins fill up with washi and marker doodles (stars, a heart, a spiral, a looping arrow), never under the words. nothing sits perfectly level. cards tilt a degree or two, as if they were pressed down in a hurry, and straighten up when you hover over them, like you just smoothed them flat with your thumb.

the whole look runs on one rule we call the sticker rule: a white die-cut rim, a dark ink outline and a hard, offset shadow. headlines are stickers. buttons are stickers. the name tabs on friends' cards are stickers. and on the island, every blob, every tree and the giant cake carry the same white rim and ink line, so a card on the board and a character on the island read as the same object made of the same stuff.

the palette

the colours are named like the stationery they came from: bubblegum pink for the big buttons and the birthday person's own blob, tangerine for party hats and frosting drips, lemon highlighter for tape and the sun, sky sticker blue for the sea and focus rings, lime smudge for the island's grass, and grape soda for the love meter and the confetti. all of it sits on butter paper and kraft, with marker ink for every word.

text is always dark ink on a light paper, or white on a strong fill, so it reads easily at every size, including on a small phone in bright sunlight. the bright colours are for fills, stickers and decoration, never for long runs of small text. the host can swap the main colour for one of six checked accents (bubblegum, tangerine, lemon, sky, lime or lavender), and every big button and name tab follows it.

the type

• Titan One for the headlines: round, heavy and loud, cut out like a vinyl sticker.
• Gochi Hand for the handwriting: captions, card messages and the little notes in the margins.
• Fredoka for everything you read at length: soft, friendly and very legible.

the birthday person's name gets the full treatment on the front page: a huge sticker headline, a strip of gingham washi across one corner, a lemon sparkle stuck on its last letter and a little wobble when it lands. friends' names sit on bubblegum tabs at the top of their cards.

the nav and the scrollbar

the nav is a strip of kraft paper torn along both edges, on a hard ink shadow, held to the top of the page by two strips of washi tape. every page is a die-cut sticker in its own colour, with the white rim, the ink line and the hard shadow: home in bubblegum, leave a card in tangerine, board in lemon, island in sky and festival in lime, each stuck on at its own slight angle. point at one and it straightens up and lifts off the kraft, its rim run over in lemon highlighter. the page you're on is a size bigger, with a lemon star slapped on its corner. the music switch is a ticket stub: a lavender stub torn along a dashed perforation, notched where the perforation meets each edge. on smaller screens the ticket keeps just its note and its arrow.

on a phone the site's name (on the front page, the little cake sticker) gets the top of the strip to itself, and the stickers wrap into two centred rows under it, the ticket last. nothing hides behind a menu button.

even the scrollbar is stationery. the thumb is a kraft tab with diagonal washi-tape stripes and three grip lines, outlined in ink, riding a kraft groove. it turns lemon when the pointer is over it and tangerine while you drag. small boxes, like the message box in the card maker, get a thinner version of the same tab.

where you'll see it

it's not a skin on one page. the theme reaches every part of the site. on the front page every section title is underlined twice in marker, and the countdown is three pages off a desk calendar, each bound in its own colour with two rings through the top. the board's title gets the same marker line, and every card is taped down at its own angle. in the card maker friends use, the steps are strung along a strip of washi with a lemon star for the one you're on, the drawing canvas is paper with marker swatches, and the back and next bar is torn off the pad. at the festival each game's best score and plays sit on a pink raffle ticket. sections are split by a strip of kraft torn across the page, the scissors on a white disc, and the last line of every page is written on a note taped down with a heart stuck on its corner. the dialogue box a friend speaks through on the island is a paper card with tape on its corners, the same card they wrote on.

even the 12 festival games wear it: chunky sticker titles, kraft score panels and a tape-edged hint bar under every round.

calm when it needs to be

the wobble, the tilts and the confetti all respect the reduced-motion setting on the device. with it on, everything still looks hand-made, it just holds still: cards stay where they're stuck, headlines don't bounce, the nav's stickers keep their lean under the pointer (the lemon rim still says which one you're pointing at), and the party carries on more quietly.

who it suits

honestly, almost everyone: it's loud enough for a 21st and warm enough for a partner. it suits the friend group whose chat is ninety percent stickers, the friend who still keeps ticket stubs in a shoebox, and anyone whose birthday deserves more than a card on a shelf. it's also the look every site starts with, free on every plan, so you can see all of it right now: walk the demo island from the button on this page, or read how it works.