goodcat 好貓

In a 3-hour deep dive, the client named the sites they liked: niwacan.jp, maupets.com, lqve.jp.

All three are the same Japanese-aesthetic family — minimal + serif headline + pure white background. Plus "clean + Japanese" was a non-negotiable — the aesthetic direction was locked in the first round of the deep dive.

So we skipped ui-ux-curator's 3-tier recommendation, locked in the single niwacan-illust template, and put budget and time into two things: color and hand-drawing.

MO Studio has 8 codified templates internally, from notion-doc (minimal docs) to kaeru-camp (Japanese outdoor hand-drawn).

niwacan-illust is "Japanese magazine layout × hand-drawn illustration lite" — lots of white space, Shippori Mincho serif headings, hand-drawn line-art pillar icons.

Against the client's beloved niwacan.jp it's 1:1 native DNA — not "close to," but the same aesthetic family. Any other template would drift.

The client didn't want "cold Nordic" — they wanted "healing, people and cats living well together." Pure white would be too cold, so we injected 4 colors into the niwacan skeleton:

Warm brown #C8956A (brand primary) / moss green #8FA68E (trust accent) / peach #F2D7C5 (soft-section base) / milk tea #E8DFD3 (content-section base).

The newsletter card uses peach, the pillar section uses milk tea — the whole site is no longer minimal white, but a warm, rhythmic magazine page. The skeleton is still niwacan; the warmth is goodcat's own.

Mandy custom-drew 18 illustrations for goodcat: a tabby by the window, a black cat napping, a living-room scene, a teacup and cat paw, plants and a cat — not stock, but scenes with warmth.

Each maps to an image slot: hero portrait, 3 pillar icons, 5 journal images, an ebook cover, newsletter visuals…

Under the template curse, "looking like every competitor" is how pet brands most often die. Hand-drawn illustration is goodcat's fingerprint — any IG screenshot is recognizably goodcat.