Portfolio: A calligrapher’s whimsical website in Squarespace
Calligraphy That Feels Like a Little Love Note
Afshawn, the absolute sweetheart behind AC Letters Calligraphy, is a San Diego-based calligrapher who specializes in envelope addressing, place cards, and personalized keepsakes. Basically, if it can be written beautifully by hand, she’s your girl. Her work is polished, intentional, and charming.
She describes calligraphy exactly how it is: a luxury. No one technically needs it. But when you receive something handwritten, something tangible and thoughtfully made just for you, it instantly feels special. Like someone really cared :’)
When Afshawn reached out, she had just wrapped up a full rebrand with Draft & Ink Design Co, and when I say it fit her goals of luxury-but-friendly, I mean it. She now had multiple logo variations and fun illustrations in a funky color palette like rich forest green, mustard, tangerine, soft peach, icy blue.
She loved it! Now we just needed her website to love it, too.
Branding by Draft & Ink Design Co:
Let’s be real, Rebrands can be tricky to implement
If you’ve ever been handed multiple logos, custom illustrations, new fonts or patterns, and a bold color palette all at once, it can feel a little like opening a beautiful box of art supplies… but not quite knowing how to utilize all the materials without things getting muddy.
And when you’re working with some older Squarespace templates (shoutout all you Montauk veterans - it was my template once, too!) you are sometimes working within pretty specific limitations. The biggest one in this case: we could only choose ONE background color for the entire site.
She had chosen the rich forest green as her site’s background color because it was her fave - but just because a color is stunning doesn’t always mean it works best at full scale. Across entire pages, it started to feel heavy, and her calligraphy no longer felt like the star.
So instead, we chose to let the green shine in her logos. Sometimes you just need to find the most “neutral” color in your palette that can play nicely with all the rest. In this case, that meant we needed to use peach as our base, and add splashes of the other colors as accents throughout.
The Website Before:
A Studio Day Transformation for this Squarespace Website
Working with the capabilities of the Montauk template, here are the many little touches of whimsy we added to make the site feel as charming as her calligraphy work:
Peach paper-texture background so the site felt warm & dimensional instead of flat
Stamp-style frames at the top of each page to creatively showcase her work
Inkpot + calligraphy pen illustrations sprinkled in to break up text and guide you through her 1-2-3 step process
A hand-with-pen icon next to testimonials so they feel like sweet handwritten notes from her clients
An envelope graphic behind the call-to-action for a subtle “seal the deal” implication
Soft wavy marquees to add movement without chaos
The ✦ diamond star detail from her logo tucked into headings & bullet points for that extra bit of brand magic
Afshawn didn’t need to rework her photos, content, or site structure. She just needed to show off her new branding in a way that flattered her work instead of distracting from it. And that’s exactly why my Studio Day service exists. It’s a short 1-week turnaround service for smaller makeovers and tweaks like these. You can learn more about the service here, and check out the new web design up close below!
The Website After:
“She added so much charm to my website in ways I never thought possible!”
I had a fabulous experience working with Emily Jane on my website re-design. I had just received new branding and was having a hard time applying it to my site - it felt like lipstick on a pig. But in just days, Emily was able to transform my website into something better than I could have even imagined. My site feels elegant but still really fun, which is exactly the vibe I am going for.
— Afshawn C.
Check out more BEJ web designs here:
