7:30 a.m. First coffee. Same ritual, every single day.

Some people have a sweet tooth. I have a coffee tooth. And while the kettle boils, I usually catch myself daydreaming about the same place: Japan, a trip I’ve wanted to take for years.

For this challenge, I brought the two together. Digging through public domain archives, I found Japanese woodblock prints with rolling waves, round windows, cherry blossoms and graceful women drawn in a few calm, confident lines. I turned them into a custom Recraft Style and gave it a brief no Edo-era print shop could have imagined: a modern café, with takeaway cups, delivery bags, loyalty cards and an ordering app.

The café is called Mado, “window” in Japanese: a small window to slow down in a busy day. Its barista, also Mado, wears an indigo wave apron, a round-window hairpin and wireless earbuds. She remembers your oat milk order, protects the window seats from video calls, and believes every laptop should close when the cake arrives.

Old prints, new rituals. My entry for the Contra × Recraft Archive Style Challenge.

Project: https://www.recraft.ai/project/432bd549-89dd-4c6e-a723-8f0c55bfd16f

Such an original idea! 😍

Made some project page fixes on my Framer template in progress and made the project index page responsive before going to bed tonight. To keep the UX feeling nice I added a scroll snapping effect to the project video panes so that they never appear only partially, but one pane at a time is always fully on screen as the user scrolls. 🔧

Really inspiring work! 😁