Case study - Nacréa, event decor
Custom built
A Montreal event decorator knew exactly what she wanted to show. Building the storefront was another trade entirely.
- Client
- Nacréa, event decor, Montreal
- Year
- 2026
- Scope
- Art direction · Custom WordPress theme · Content and SEO · Client training
The brief, in her own words
Nadine Dubé builds party decor in Montreal. Backdrops sewn to measure, balloon walls assembled by hand, organic arches, neon signs traced in someone's first name. She installs the night before, strikes at dawn, and in between there is a thirtieth birthday in a Laval basement, a baby shower on the South Shore, or an open house facing two thousand visitors.
When she wrote to me she already had a site. She had built it herself with the tool her host provides, over many evenings. It worked, in the narrow sense that the pages loaded. But building a site is not her trade, any more than assembling a balloon wall is mine, and it showed.
I needed a professional online presence for my event decorating business. I wanted to present my services, show my work and my style, and above all have a place where clients can easily discover what I do and reach me for a quote. I needed a beautiful storefront that represents my company well and earns the trust of future clients.
A simple brief, on the face of it. The real work appeared when I opened her documents.
What her documents said, and what they did not
Before drawing anything I asked for everything she had: her services sheet, her portfolio, her sales pitch, her on-site photos. Two documents stopped me.
The first was her thirty-second pitch. It said she created immersive experiences combining technology, design and storytelling, aimed at cultural institutions, brands and organisations. The vocabulary of a large scenography studio.
The second was her services document. It listed backdrops two to three metres wide starting at a thousand dollars, butterfly, unicorn and Alice in Wonderland themes, and a list of add-ons running from a bouncy castle to balloon sculpture.
Both described the same company. Neither described the same customer.
That gap was not a copywriting detail. A site promising immersive installations for cultural institutions attracts enquiries she does not want to handle, and turns away the parents looking for exactly what she makes best.
I settled it with her: the first version of the site would sell party decor, plainly, with her prices and her service area. The immersive side would come later, once she had work to show in that register. She will be able to add it herself, without calling me.
That is the kind of call that never shows up on a mockup and still decides whether a site pays for itself.
The art direction came from her
During our interview she spent a long time on my own portfolio. Not out of politeness. She kept returning to the same things: the very large, very assertive typography, visuals treated as objects laid on the page rather than filed into boxes, the general energy.
I followed that lead rather than pitching her a register she would not have liked. With one clear limit: draw on that language without handing her a copy of my site. A party decorator and a web studio do not have the same voice.
The shared grammar is the foundation: condensed type at very large sizes, a deep ground that makes the images carry, words highlighted in blocks of colour to mark hierarchy, no drop-shadowed cards and no rounded corners.
What belongs to her alone is everything else, and everything else comes from her trade.
Her photos are presented as prints laid in an album, light frame and caption below, held by lilac photo corners. They sit straight, scattered at uneven sizes that overlap a little. Party keepsakes spread across a table.
A garland of triangular bunting runs under every section title. Balloons drift slowly through the empty areas, each with its string, in the colours of her palette. Confetti is scattered through the opening and down the page. Her list of services is punctuated not with bullets but with small balloons on strings.
None of it is decorative in the idle sense. These are the objects she handles all day, redrawn as interface elements. The palette is hers, fixed from the start: deep plum, mauve, lilac, very pale peach, frosted blue. One type family across the whole site. No gradients, no card shadows, no rounded corners.
The hard part: dark photos, a light palette
Five of her six reference photos are corporate events dominated by orange and black. Her brand palette is peach and amethyst. Side by side, the two fought.
Tinting her photos would have been the easy answer and the wrong one. A decorator sells a colour: a peach balloon, amber light, an amethyst tablecloth. Shifting the hue of a delivered setup means showing something other than what the client will buy, and setting up a complaint on comparison day.
The answer came from structure rather than retouching. The site alternates light bands and deep bands. The light frame of the print isolates each photo from the ground, the way a mount isolates a work from its wall.
The images keep their exact colours, and the brand stays visible everywhere else. The only treatment applied is one exposure normalisation, identical across all of them. It narrows the gap between an overexposed shot and a blocked-up one. Without lying about anything.
What I delivered
A WordPress theme written to measure, with no page builder and no off-the-shelf theme. The visual system is locked in the code. The content is wide open.
In practice Nadine manages her own portfolio, her services, her frequently asked questions, every piece of copy on the home page, her key figures and her footer. She picks which photo greets visitors by ticking a box. She sets the display order with a number. She cannot break the layout, because the layout is never handed to her.
The quote form sends enquiries straight to her inbox without her address appearing anywhere in the page source. That is a security decision as much as a convenience one: an address written in plain sight on a site is harvested by bots within days.
The rest is the work nobody sees and everything depends on. Alt text on every image, written for Google and for screen readers. Social sharing tags, so a link posted on Facebook or Instagram shows a real image rather than an empty rectangle. A privacy policy compliant with Quebec's Law 25, since the form collects personal information. A site icon derived from her vector logo. Contrast checked at AA on every colour pair on the page, at four screen widths.
One example of that kind of detail: the browser was loading photos at full resolution to display them in four-hundred-pixel frames. Correcting the size declarations brought the home page image weight from 1172 down to 755 kilobytes, thirty-six per cent less, without a single image losing visible quality.
Finally, a fourteen-page administration manual, written for someone who has never opened WordPress. Not technical documentation: screenshots of what she actually sees, the exact button labels, a troubleshooting table for the small everyday problems, and a glossary.
It opens with the sentence that matters most when the trade is not yours: you cannot break the way your site looks.
A few markers from the build
36%
less image weight on the home page, from 1172 down to 755 kilobytes
6
content blocks the client manages alone, without ever touching the layout
14
pages of administration manual, written for someone who has never opened WordPress
AA
contrast verified on every colour pair, at four screen widths
The outcome
The site is live at nacrea.ca. It replaces the old one, kept in backup while she finds her footing.
She publishes new work on her own. Quote requests land in her inbox with the date, the venue and the theme of the event, which spares her three rounds of email before she can price anything.
And her storefront finally looks like what she makes.
What I take from this project
A client who spends a long time showing you a site they love tells you more than any discovery questionnaire. You still have to hear it. It is a direction to translate, not a template to copy.
And a brief phrased simply often hides the real work. Nadine asked for a beautiful storefront. What had to be settled first was what to sell, and to whom.
A similar project?
If you recognise your own situation on this page, write to me. I reply within 48 hours, and I say plainly when a project does not look ready to me.