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Oleander Stories
Story tools for writers and the people who love them. The story in your head deserves to be written.
Challenge
The Novel Toolkit and Memoir Toolkit had grown into real products with their own audiences, but they lived as subdomains of a publishing house whose dark, kintsugi-inspired identity was built for notebooks and survival decks, not for writing tools. They needed a home of their own: a brand warm enough for a grandparent making a keepsake book and credible enough for a novelist on their fifth manuscript, with room for new tools to join without rebranding each time.
Approach
Created Oleander Stories as a parent brand built around one idea: every tool starts by asking the right questions. Designed an original mark, an open book with a fountain-pen nib rising into a five-petal oleander bloom under a north star, that recolors per product family. Set a warm paper and deep navy palette with Newsreader over Instrument Sans, then built the hub site as a router: tell us what you're making and it points you to the tool built for it. The toolkits were rebranded and moved to novel. and memoir. subdomains with a shared design system, and Bunny Stories was staged as the third family.
Outcome
Live at oleanderstories.com with the Novel Toolkit and Memoir Toolkit shipping under the new brand on one-time pricing. Bunny Stories, an illustrated children's keepsake book, is in development, with single-task writing assistants (Editor & Critic, Query Letter Writer, Jacket Copy Writer) planned to follow.
Services and deliverables
Brand Strategy & Design
- Logo & Brand Identity: Original book, nib, and oleander mark with light and dark variants, a product-family color system (sky blue for Novel, rose for Memoir, sage for Bunny Stories), and a serif-over-sans type pairing. (Logo Design, Brand Identity, Design Systems, Color Theory, Typography)
Website Design
- Oleander Stories Hub Site: Parent site that routes visitors to the right tool in one question, with sample outlines, product sections, account sign-in, and SEO and sharing metadata baked in. (React, Vite, UI/UX Design, Copywriting, Responsive Design, SEO)
- Toolkit Rebrand & Migration: Novel Toolkit and Memoir Toolkit restyled on the shared design system and moved to their own Oleander Stories subdomains, keeping Cloudflare, Stripe, and Claude API pipelines intact. (Design Systems, Cloudflare Pages, Stripe, Claude API, Brand Migration)
A project by Ember Pulse Studios, a web design and branding studio in Myrtle Beach, SC.
Ember Pulse Studios · Myrtle Beach, SC · 843-424-9090 · support@emberpulsestudios.com