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Cherry Pit Nail Studio

Editorial serif · Borrowed colour · Painted rules

A one-room nail studio built after taking the category apart. The page owns no colour of its own — it borrows the polish colours of whichever set you are looking at, and hands them back when you leave.

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Overview

The brief we gave ourselves

A concept for a nail studio on South Main in Las Vegas that takes four clients a day and paints all ten nails by hand. It was designed against the category rather than away from it: five real studio sites were pulled apart first, and the premium end turned out to be remarkably specific — a licensed high-contrast display serif at weight 300, headings around 40px, full-bleed photography, and a drawn logotype rather than a name set in the body font.

So the register is theirs and the ideas are not. Four commitments do the separating: colour is borrowed from the work, every rule on the page is a painted brush stroke instead of a hairline, the layout is ragged while the photographs are a rigid typology, and the display type stays small.

Design goals

Every choice had a job to do

Let the page borrow its colour

Each set carries its real polish colours. Hovering one retints every painted line on the page, then hands the colour back. It never touches text — polish colours are arbitrary and some of them measure 1.6:1 on cream.

Replace every hairline with a brush stroke

Not one 1px rule in the build. Dividers, nav underlines and price rows are all painted strokes, which is the one mark this trade can make that a rectangle cannot.

Ragged page, rigid pictures

Labels sit out in the left margin and the grid runs uneven columns, while every photograph holds the same ratio, crop and caption format. The looseness is in the layout so the work can stay disciplined.

Keep the display type small

Cormorant Garamond at 300, around 40px. An earlier pass ran a 700-weight grotesk at 110px and read as a software company; in this category the restraint is the signal.

Features implemented

What’s actually in the build

Colour-borrowing system: every painted rule takes the polish colours of the set under the cursor
Brush-stroke intro — a streak is laid across the screen, then the colour opens out of it
Drawn logotype: cherry-pit mark, letterspaced serif wordmark, studio line beneath
Museum wall-label captions — title, medium, duration, date, price
Four real pages, each with its own title and shareable URL
Full price list including removal, repairs and length surcharges
Photographs held to one ratio and one crop so a set of images reads as a body of work
Intro plays once per session, skips for reduced-motion, and never runs inside a frame

The business problem

Why this design makes money

The category has two settings: a pink gradient with the word luxury, or a dark-and-gold template. Neither tells you what the artist actually makes.

Nail work is already visual and already online, so the website is not where the pictures live — it is where somebody decides whether a number is a lot or a little. Most studio sites answer that with a booking button and a stock orchid, which reads as the same set every strip-mall shop sells.

This concept borrows the visual manners of the best studios in the category and then does three things none of them do: it publishes the whole price list, it captions work the way a gallery captions work, and it gives the page no colour except what it takes from the polish in front of you.

Design gallery