She wanted tropical. She also doesn’t like anything literal.
Kandace runs Pinterest marketing on her own out of Florida. She found me on Messenger, signed the same day, and asked for something bright, airy and tropical. Then she told me she doesn’t like things that are literal. No palm clip art. No beach photos. Good. Those were never going to be the interesting version anyway.
Built, and in her hands
The page is built and she has been watching it come together on a private link the whole way. I’m waiting on her finished first revision round, and then it launches on her own domain.
The pictures here are from the build as it stood before her revision round. The real thing goes in when it’s live.
One page, and how much fits in one page
A single landing page, buttons going out to the tools she already uses, one revision round. No form, no checkout, no second page. That’s what she bought and I’m not going to pretend it was a bigger job than it was.
What a page like that lives or dies on is whether it feels like a place instead of a flyer. Twelve sections on one scroll can very easily turn into a document, and a document isn’t going to convince anybody that the person selling design attention has any.
Tropical without the tropics
Search any site in this space and you get the same three moves: a beach, a laptop on a beach, and a font that’s trying very hard. Kandace ruling out literal imagery took all of that off the table in one sentence.
So the warmth had to come from somewhere structural. Her own brand board already had the answer on it: Moroccan lattice. I pulled two motifs off it, a fretwork and a stepped strapwork, and used each one four different ways so no two panels next to each other are wearing the same pattern.
Everything decorative on that page is drawn: the lattice, the starburst, the monogram, the color fields, the marks. Nothing bought, nothing stock, nothing that turns up on somebody else’s site next month.
Thirteen panels, and two colors that didn’t make it
Her navy is the ground everything else stands on, and the brighter colors take turns on top of it. I mapped all thirteen panels so neighbors never repeat: paper, mint, warm paper, pale blush, paper, pale mint, and so on down, with the chapter breaks and the closing panel in the navy.
Her amber and her coral are two of the prettiest colors she owns and neither one is a panel. Her navy lands at 3.2 to 1 on the amber and 3.4 to 1 on the coral, and AA wants 4.5. Pretty isn’t a good enough reason to make somebody squint, so they show up as accents instead of backgrounds.
Four section shapes on rotation
One shape repeated twelve times is a document. Four on rotation is a page you keep scrolling.
- 01
Lead and body
Heading left, the content carrying the right. The plainest one, used sparingly.
- 02
Mirrored
The same shape flipped, so two sections in a row never sit the same way.
- 03
Oversized statement
One line at display size doing the whole job, with nothing else on the panel.
- 04
Full bleed showcase
The content runs edge to edge and the heading tucks into it.
There’s a rule under the decoration too: it never stacks. A lattice band and a frond don’t share a corner, and anything translucent gets an opaque silhouette of itself painted underneath in the panel’s own color, so the pattern behind it can’t read straight through.
The parts people actually get wrong
Her four packages are a sideways swipe on a phone, one per screen with the next one peeking in from the edge and a cue that says so. No card borders, no boxes. Four price cards stacked vertically is four chances to stop scrolling.
The sections pin on a phone too, not just on desktop. The usual way to do that is to give up on anything taller than the screen, because a tall section pinned to the top hides its own last line. So the tall ones get a negative offset measured at runtime and hold at the bottom of the screen instead. Same effect, nothing cut off.
One photo of her on the entire site, and it’s in the About section. The hero does its work with type, color and lattice. A face in a hero is the easiest decision available and it almost never earns the space.
You get to watch it happen
As soon as there’s a version up, you get the link. I’d rather you see it grow than hand you a finished thing and hope.
While I’m still finding the direction, I leave the commentary wide open. Tell me it isn’t landing, tell me why, tell me halfway through a section. That part isn’t a revision round and it doesn’t count as one.
Once the direction is locked, it closes, and we move to the set rounds. That’s not me getting precious about feedback. It’s the only way the site stops moving long enough to actually get finished.
All of it, in her name
The code lives in her GitHub. The host is her Cloudflare account. The editor is connected to her repo, so when she changes a word it publishes itself without coming back through me. I’m a collaborator on her stuff, not a landlord of it.
Three typefaces, all self hosted as files in her project, so the page isn’t phoning a font service on every visit. It costs her nothing a month and it will keep costing her nothing a month.
One landing page, counted
Measured against the built page, not a mockup.
- 0Stock photos. Every mark on the page is drawn.
- 1Photo of her on the whole site, and it's in the About section, not the hero.
- 13Color panels, mapped so no two neighbors match.
- 2Lattice motifs off her own brand board, applied four ways each.
- 4Section shapes, alternating, so the page never reads like a document.
- 3Typefaces, self hosted, so nothing calls out to Google for a font.
- $0What the stack costs her a month. Everything on free plans, in her name.
- 1Page. That was the deal, and it's the whole point of this one.
Her round, her content, her domain
Her first revision round is with her now, along with the final copy and photos. When that comes back I build off it, and then it goes live on her own domain instead of the preview link.
I’ll come back and update this at launch, and again at thirty to sixty days with whatever actually happened.
Your website should be yours.
One page or twenty, it gets built for your brand and handed over in your name.