TTechtonic

Client project · Floral & event design

Design by Masuma

Design by Masuma is a floral and event design studio for weddings, celebrations, and installations. We designed and built a full-stack website around large, full-bleed photography — with a live consultation calendar and an inquiry flow that emails the studio every time someone reaches out.

Visit designbymasuma.com
Homepage of the Design by Masuma website, showing the headline Flowers that hold a room over a close-up of a peony
Screenshot of the public homepage, captured by Techtonic Innovations on September 21, 2026.

The client and the goal

For a floral and event design studio, the work sells itself — if the website gets out of its way. The goal was a site that feels like walking into the studio: photography first, calm motion, and a short path from "this is beautiful" to "is my date available?".

The challenge

Heavy imagery and cinematic motion can easily make a site slow or inaccessible. The studio also needed real booking logic — offering only consultation slots that are genuinely open — and a guarantee that no inquiry is ever lost, even on serverless hosting where the filesystem is read-only.

What we built

A single-page front end in plain JavaScript on top of a small Express JSON API, deployed so the same app runs as a normal Node server locally and as one serverless function on Vercel.

  • A persistent photographic "garden" layer: a real flower irises open from its center on load, parallaxes and scales as you scroll, and crossfades to a new bloom for each section, with a warm gradient fallback if a photo fails to load.
  • GSAP-assisted entrance animations with a guaranteed CSS settle, scroll reveals, a scroll-progress bar, a custom cursor, and curtain wipes between sections.
  • A palette switcher on the Services page that crossfades the house centerpiece between four seasonal palettes.
  • A filterable portfolio loaded from the API, with an accessible lightbox.
  • A live consultation calendar that offers only open slots, and an inquiry form that returns a reference number on submission.
  • Full respect for prefers-reduced-motion: motion is disabled throughout and the hero flower shows as a still image.

Architecture and security

The API exposes four endpoints — health, portfolio, availability, and inquiries. A valid inquiry is saved, its slot reserved, and the studio emailed via Nodemailer. Email is treated as the durable record on Vercel (where local writes are best-effort), and a failed send never blocks the visitor's confirmation.

Security is built in rather than bolted on: Helmet sets a Content-Security-Policy that allows exactly the external origins the site uses (Google Fonts, the GSAP CDN, and the image host), JSON bodies are capped at 32 KB, inquiries are rate-limited to 20 per 15 minutes per IP, the proxy is trusted correctly so limits apply to real client IPs, and mail credentials come only from environment variables.

This combination of a design-led front end and a small, careful backend is typical of our custom software and web application work.

Results

  • Live on the client's own domain at designbymasuma.com (www redirects to it).
  • The site's health endpoint and portfolio API respond in production (checked September 21, 2026).
  • Built across August 1–2, 2026, per the repository's commit history.
  • Every inquiry is emailed to the studio, so nothing depends on serverless disk storage.

Facts verified against the project's repository and live site. Past results don't guarantee future results; every project is different.

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