This is part one of a short series about something I’ve been quietly working on for a while: getting the site and socials to actually feel like they belong together. It’s taken some trial and error to land on an approach I’m happy with, and I’m hoping it makes a difference you can feel scrolling through. Part two gets into the actual Highland Rift Pack colours.

The problem was never the method, it was sticking to it

I’ve always sampled colours from the covers rather than starting from a mood board. That part was never the issue. What kept tripping me up was consistency: I’d run a good stretch, maybe four weeks, where the socials for a book matched properly, and then I’d see something pretty someone else had done, like it, and quietly copy the idea without checking whether it actually fit the book’s colours at all. A few of those and the whole feed had drifted into a dozen different looks with no thread between them.

One system, many series

Writing across paranormal romance and urban fantasy means different colour families per series, and that was never going to change. The fix isn’t one palette for everything, it’s one consistent method: sample from the covers, carry those colours through site and social deliberately, and keep a shared vocabulary of typefaces, mark style, and layout logic even where the colours themselves differ from series to series.

Site colour vs book colour vs social colour

The overall website has its own calm, consistent base identity. Each series or book layers its own colour on top for its pages and posts. Social versions run darker and higher contrast than the site, because scroll speed is different from a deliberate site visit. Three tiers, one system, rather than three unrelated decisions made separately.

Why a reader would care

This is the bit I keep coming back to when the drift creeps in again. When the colours hold, a reader can recognise which world a post belongs to at a glance, before they’ve read a word of the caption. That’s the whole point, not tidiness for its own sake, but bringing readers along on the journey clearly enough that they know where they are.

An honest note before part two

I want to be upfront that this isn’t a solved problem with a neat bow on it. This is another attempt at sticking to the system rather than drifting again, and I genuinely don’t know yet whether it’ll hold better than the last one did. What I do know is that when it’s held, even for a few weeks at a time, it’s made a real difference, readers can feel the series identity in a way they can’t when everything’s inconsistent. I want to keep it going. I’m just not making promises.

Where the series goes from here

Part two gets into the Highland Rift Pack specifics: the colours themselves, the wolf mark, and how site and social versions differ in practice. Death and Visions will get its own post once there’s enough visual identity built to actually show.