Ubud, Bali
Believe Bali
A threshold, then a clear and quiet light.
- Year
- 2026
- Role
- Art direction, design, development
- Pages
- Twelve
- Languages
- French and English
01
What was there before
Camille gives energy healing sessions in Ubud and runs retreats of several days, with healers, a yoga teacher and a musician around her.
Her site had been built on a ready-made template, bought and then left half way. Pieces of the original template were still living in it, with someone else’s products and links. She summed it up in two words: unfinished, badly organised.
No price appeared anywhere, and no English version, in Ubud.
02
Light is the subject
The same year, on the site of two sports coaches, I had gone for an almost total black. Here the light is the subject itself. A spiritual retreat speaks of waking up, of becoming aware, of clarity: the ground had to be that light.
What I wanted a visitor to feel on arrival: confidence, freedom, clarity, something spiritual.
And what I ruled out from the start, because it is exactly what the subject attracts: the loud purple, the stock crystal ball, the busy mandala.
03
The threshold
The site does not open on its home page. It opens on a threshold: a video of Bali, Camille’s seal, one sentence, and a single word to click, Enter.
The idea is mine, and it costs a click. You do not walk into a retreat the way you walk into a shop. That click is the visitor’s first gesture, and it is made on purpose.
It is also where the language is chosen, before anything else.
04
The art direction
Three typefaces. Cormorant Garamond for the headlines, large and light. Lato for everything that gets read. Parisienne, handwritten, for a single sentence, the one on the threshold.
The blue does not come from me. Camille’s seal, the flower of life she was already using, was blue, and the palette was built around it: cream and white for the ground, midnight blue for the text, coral for what calls out.
The type scale runs from 17 to 59 pixels. One to three and a half, where the coaches’ site runs from 11 to 200. Two registers, two voices.
The palette
- #FFFFFFThe white, the ground of the content pages
- #E6E3D9The cream, the sections that breathe
- #11202FThe ink, a midnight blue, for the text
- #46535FThe blue grey, for what comes alongside
- #F58754The coral, the eyebrows, the links, what calls out
- #91D8FFThe sky blue, the colour of the seal, in rare touches
The type
- Cormorant GaramondThe headlines, 17 to 59 px
- LatoThe text, 9 to 18 px
- ParisienneThe threshold sentence, 39 px
05
What you do not see straight away
The team page is a set of cards, face down. Four identical backs, and nothing else. You have to turn one over to see who is there.
A site that sells puts the faces first. Here it does not, and that is deliberate. A card reading does not show what it hides, and you only learn what is behind a card by turning it over. That is the moment the page wanted to give, rather than a grid of portraits.
The rest of the site follows the same idea, more gently. A watermark that slides as you scroll, a stack of reviews that opens when you reach it.
06
The site says tu, not vous
French has two ways of saying you, one formal and one familiar. My first art direction note used the formal one in every descriptive text. The site as delivered uses the familiar one throughout: “Reconnecte-toi à ton essence divine”, “Je t’accompagne vers la guérison de l’âme”.
I changed my mind along the way. The formal address held the reader at arm’s length on a site that speaks of wounds and inner peace, and it clashed with Camille’s own words, which I had forbidden myself to rewrite.
Her “I” stayed for her own practice, “we” for the group retreats.
07