Portfolio: Feminine Squarespace web design for a florist
about kosmic garden
Creative floristry based in Baltimore.
Kosmic Garden is a floral shop run by Tara Kosmas, a nurse and burn survivor who found her awakening through nature. Back in 2014, her newfound overwhelming love for flowers helped her reconnect to her authentic self and revel in the abundance of life. Muy poética.
She now serves the East Coast area with her beautiful, brightly-colored bouquets and wedding floristry.
Kosmic Garden is also big on charitable causes. If you donate 10 vases or baskets to their shop, you can get a free bouquet! I love that!
Even better, they now run a not-for-profit mental health program for registered nurses, called Heal the Healers, which their flower shop sales help to fund!
It was a pleasure working with someone so passionate whose business serves an honest purpose.
the requests
In Tara’s words, “I need a website that doesn’t look like I did it.”
Lol, I totally get that.
Oftentimes the Squarespace demo sites will look fabulous, but once you start plugging in your own content, things start to go array. What da hek man?!
It happens to the best of us, and Tara had gone through this before reaching out.
In its original state the website looked a bit too homemade for her taste. She asked for a new color scheme, better layout, and to have her photos look more eye-catching.
She also had this fabulous, intricate logo designed by a friend and needed a website to match.
the design
Tara had initially tried using the Squarespace 7.1 template, Patil, as the demo content was already geared toward florists.
Unfortunately, because the default grey background of the template is so dark, it was putting a damper on all of Kosmic Garden’s fun bouquet images. It’s understandable that she felt they needed to stand out more.
Additionally, these sample websites tend to have huuuge thumbnails for shop items that take up the whole page. (Not the most refined look, unless your photos are out-of-this-world professional quality.)
So we needed to see how we could make this template work better for her brand and her vision!
(Btw, if you are interested in checking out Squarespace’s templates for yourself, you can do so here! That’s my affiliate link 😉)
Here’s how the Patil template looked to start with:
First and foremost, I wanted Tara’s website to reflect the peace and joy that flowers had brought into her life.
I then took a good long study of her logo and thought about how I would extrapolate that into a full website design.
I also had to make sure that the photos of herself and her husband she wanted to use for banner images would fit right in.
So I worked on crafting a color scheme that would create a bridge between all these elements. I wanted something earthy with a touch of energy. Here’s the scheme I came up with:
I decided switching over to a clean white background would be best, since her shop items had a very wide variety of colors that needed to pop.
I then searched for photos and textures that would work within this color scheme as well as the aesthetic of the nature-inspired floral shop.
I got to work building out the layout that was user-friendly and optimized for conversion, using her copy and the photos I’d sourced. Wherever I felt we needed an extra touch of life, I would add in a boho-minimalist graphic element, using the colors from the color palette.
And here was the final result!
I’m so happy to say Tara was thrilled with her fresh, vibrant new website!
