Almost everything I wanted to do was on her list of nos.

Four directions went out at one link. She picked two, The Pennant and The Layer, so I merged them into one home page on the same link: her palette pulled out of the logo, the brighter backgrounds she asked for, the banner builder rebuilt from her real order form. She approved that, and the whole site got built in it, all 29 pages.

Then I kept making calls as the real pages came together. I tried them on the home page only, with every other page still in the styling she had signed off, and showed her the two side by side. She chose to carry them through the rest of the site rather than keep them on the home page.

I’m almost done with her first revision round now. She has one more after it, and then it launches. Nothing is live yet, so the pictures here are the design rounds. The real thing goes in when it goes up.

I’m posting it this early on purpose. The decisions worth reading about all happen before launch and nobody shows them.

It’s a scholarship build, so Kristen isn’t paying for it. I give away one full custom build every three months. Same work, no invoice.

Someone fills out her form, she emails back a free mock-up, they go back and forth, she invoices, then she makes it. Every step is an email.

Somebody who wants a banner for a party in two weeks doesn’t always survive a week of that. Excitement peaks in the first ten minutes and the process asks them to wait. That gap is a website problem, not a business problem.

Her other one: customers kept getting surprised by what the cardstock actually looks like in person. She asked for a page showing her real colors, and she was right to.

Four real pathways, and none of them cost her a revision round. That’s the whole point. They sit in front of the rounds, so the rounds she does spend go on refining something she already picked.

The fourth one is mine. She had ruled out movement and I still thought it suited her, so I built my version once and said so. No obligation. Showing the idea once beats quietly ignoring what she asked for.

A client’s restrictions are never a reason to ship a plain site. When someone bans what I normally reach for, my job is finding where my craft and their limits meet.

So I reread her list. Every item is about things that move, rotate, sprawl or leave holes. None of them say quiet. She didn’t ask for a plain site, she asked for a still one.

So I moved the craft into what holds still: material, type, shape, depth, detail. And the material was right there. She makes cut layered cardstock, so I built the sites out of paper. Strung pennants, scalloped edges with real shadows, offset backing sheets, die cut corners, punched index cards, registration marks, a cutting mat grid.

All static. All hers. Not one rule broken.

Her no ragged rows rule sounds like styling. It’s arithmetic. Fifteen only divides evenly at three and five across, so at two or four the last row rags.

The fix wasn’t clever CSS, it was a sixteenth tile: “Your Own Idea”, linking to the banner builder. Sixteen divides at two, four and eight. Even at every breakpoint, and it catches the person whose theme isn’t listed.

Same on the colors page. Sixty papers in one grid instead of thirty-four solids alone, because sixty divides at two, three, four and six.

This is the piece aimed at that week of email. Pick your wording, shape, lettering, up to three colors and any extras, and an SVG draws the banner as you go. One button writes the whole thing into the order form below it, so nothing gets typed twice.

I wasn’t going to guess at her shapes. I went through every banner she has photographed and recorded how each one is actually cut. Ten shapes, all real, each labeled with the set it came from.

The nineteen lettering styles are numbered exactly like her own order form, so style eleven on the site and style eleven in her inbox are the same thing. Matching her paperwork instead of inventing my own is the difference between a tool she uses and one she works around.

34 solids, 14 foils, 12 glitters. I sampled every hex from a photo of the actual paper instead of picking colors that looked nice, because the whole point is that what you see is what shows up. Foils and glitters get a real gradient mixed from their own color so they catch light instead of going flat.

Pick up to three and watch them land on a pennant preview. It only reacts to a click, so it lives inside her no movement rule.

What the merged direction is made of: The Layer’s frame, The Pennant’s strung line opening each section and its dimensional headline type, sections alternating in the four colors out of her logo. She wanted brighter backgrounds than any of the four had. Right about that too.

One thing is deliberately open. She hasn’t decided whether to take payment up front or keep invoicing after a mock-up, so I haven’t built checkout. Building it before she decides means building it twice.

Her second round comes after this one, and then it goes live. I’ll update this at launch, and again at thirty to sixty days with whatever actually happened.