Building the little world.

• A beautifully designed little world that happens to sell things.Collected, not decorated. Curated, editorial, tactile.
• Three doors: Shop, Custom Work, and About.Shop splits into Digital Goods (buy now) and Paper Goods (request).
• A homepage that opens on a collage of your real pieces.No photo shoot needed to launch; it gets more photographic as the library grows.
• Launch small and honest.One digital collection, request forms for made-to-order work, quotes instead of price tables.
• A system, not a one-off.Adding a product, color story or collection shouldn't break the look.

Two things the brief didn't cover that I'll handle:

Shopify, with a design made just for this shop.

Shopify handles the parts that have to be bulletproof: checkout, instant downloads, payments and sales tax. You'd add and edit products yourself, from a computer or the Shopify app on your phone.

The design would be a custom theme, not a template. Templates are built around tidy grids, and your brief asks for overlap, asymmetry and pieces that feel collected. A custom theme gets us that, and the words, pictures and products all stay editable.

Shopify My pick

Best at selling, especially downloads. Monthly plan plus card fees.

Webflow

Better if you want to rearrange pages yourself. Less built for selling.

Squarespace or Etsy

Fastest to set up, but a template would fight almost every line of the brief.

1. Shopify or Webflow?Mostly comes down to whether you want to move things around on pages yourself, or just add products.
2. Do you have web licenses for the fonts?Adele Moon, Morello, Augustine Typewriter / Vintage Goods and CS Sione. Desktop licenses usually don't cover a website. The sketch uses free stand-ins until we know.
3. Can someone buy a banner right away?The brief shows starting prices for banners. Is that "add to cart," or a request with a price guide?
4. What should each request form ask?Event date, quantity, wording, colors, a guest list? And which email should requests go to?
5. How do you want to be paid for made-to-order work?A deposit up front, full payment, or an invoice once you've agreed on a quote?
6. Shipping, pickup, or both?For paper goods, and where you'd ship to.
7. What's in the first digital collection?Which pieces, what the customer gets (a PDF, an editable template, both), and whether it's personal use only.
8. Can you send the Custom Work copy?The brief mentions approved copy for that section. The sketch has a highlighted stand-in until then.
9. What do we already have?A domain name, a business email, Instagram, an Etsy shop or older site to link or move over.
10. Who writes the About story?And is there a portrait or a hands-at-work photo to go with it?

This is the biggest job, bigger than the code. The homepage collage is built from real pieces, so it can only be as good as what goes into it.

TipFlat pieces look best scanned. Photograph everything else straight-on, on a plain background, in window light, so each piece can be cut out cleanly.

1. DecideGo through the questions above together and pick the platform.
2. Get the homepage rightRefine the sketch with your fonts and real pieces until it passes your own checklist. It sets the look for every other page.
3. Design the other roomsPaper Goods, Custom Work, Digital Goods, a product page and About, each sketched and approved the same way.
4. Build it for realTurn the approved designs into the Shopify theme. Set up checkout, downloads and the request forms.
5. Stock the shelvesLoad products, photos and words. Test a real purchase and a real request, on a phone and a computer.
6. Open the doorsLaunch, then work through the "refine later" list in your brief.