Parlor Flowers
Design study for a flower shop whose homepage builds the arrangement while you choose it.
A design study. Parlor Flowers is a made-up business, so the copy, prices and details are invented to show how the design works.
Overview
Project overview
A made-up florist in Wilmington with same-day delivery. Most of its orders come in a hurry, so the homepage opens on a builder that draws the bouquet as you pick colors, size and vase, and counts down to the 1 pm cut-off for delivery today.
Approach
How I approached it
This is a design study for a flower shop I made up. A lot of florist orders happen in a hurry: someone needs flowers at a door this afternoon. So the page opens on a builder. You pick a color story, a size and a vase or paper wrap, and a small bouquet in an oval frame redraws itself as you choose, with the price and the time left before today’s 1 pm cut-off right underneath.
The look comes from a Victorian parlor: bottle-green walls, wallpaper with a repeating flower sprig, and a gilt oval frame like a portrait on the wall. The wallpaper only covers the top of the page where the builder is. Below it the page is plain, so the ready-made arrangements, delivery fees and hours are easy to read.
The details are where flower sites usually lose people, so I kept the numbers consistent everywhere. The order form keeps a receipt that adds the delivery fee for each area, the ready-made arrangements cost exactly what the builder would charge for the same size, and the weddings section lists its three steps in the order they happen, with prices.
What was delivered
Deliverables
- An arrangement builder at the top of the page: four color stories, three sizes and a vase or paper wrap, drawn live as a bouquet in an oval frame
- A running total and a delivery cut-off by the shop's own clock, showing how long is left to order for today or which day it will go out
- Six ready-made arrangements with photos, priced the same way as the builder, each one click away from the order form
- An order form with a running receipt that adds the delivery fee for each area and puts the total on the button
- A weddings section laid out in the order things happen, from consultation to proposal to delivery and setup, with prices and a request form
Key decisions
- A Victorian wallpaper drawn in SVG, a flower sprig in an ogee lattice in one green stroke on bottle green, behind the hero and the builder only
- The bouquet is made of circles and leaf shapes that the radio buttons recolor and resize through CSS, so it works before any script loads
- Bodoni Moda in italic for the large headings and Karla for reading, with blush, marigold and plum set against the green like flowers on a wall