Hi all!
My name is Noah, and I'm the lead designer/programmer in charge of the upcoming redesign of the official merch store! Yes, the one that had a pitch black background with barely any cute Homestucky theming. I managed to convince Vibri, who manages the store, to let me take a flamethrower to the thing and rebuild it from the ground up. I have never made a Shopify theme before, but I've made websites so surely it's not that painful, right? 
It was already shown on Twitter and Tumblr, but I thought making a thread here could be a fun way to build up some hype!
That, above, was the old design. I'm never going to bash any Shopify theme designer ever again, because Christ Almighty, having to use Shopify Liquid revealed to me a secret 9th level of Hell, one much like the Minus World in Super Mario Bros. that subjects you to an equally comparable evil known as: "having to play a water level forever". Of course, I'm exagerrating for your entertainment and making the store was pretty fun when I wasn't feeling like I wanted to punch Tobias Lütke in his face for allowing his engineering team to use such an awful web framework that exists only to torture developers and have people use their expensive AI to code your theme for you.
Anyway, if I don't get to the point soon, I'm going to find an 11th layer known as FRAF users torturing me for wasting their time, so let's saw through all this 'ado' and get to the creamy inside of this "New MSPA Store Theme"-flavoured pie.
So, what do we think? I already teased it a little bit on Twitter and it made its way onto Tumblr, so if you're unable to view the images from Imgur (sorry, brits!) you can find some previews there just as well.
This design was inspired a lot by other stores, namely the old WhatPumpkin store's stylized pixel elements and Fangamer's frontpage. WhatPumpkin used to have this store page that felt very SBurb-esque in its UI, so I hoped to capture some of that vibe with the abundance of captcha card masks on buttons and images. Fangamer has a similar structure as a merch store that provides merch for a variety of projects, so I thought the way they structured their frontpage would be best.
It turns out the stylized approach I took to the password page made some people think it was some kind of ARG, haha. This was done before I was informed that the Scalemates would return, so it's a happy accident. I guess Terezi owns the store now, huh? >:P
The site features a couple of easter eggs. One is a secret collection for the brave users of HSOD that you might've already seen on the old store (this time with a big redesign) and the others are more minor things like secret messages that you can only find under certain circumstances. I won't be showing any of those here, so please explore for yourself once the site is up! I'm betting on early-mid May, but it's not in my control. I hope you'll like it!
You can already find the link to the official MSPA store on the Homestuck website, but here it is anyway. I find it pretty funny that there's 4 official Homestuck merch stores, but at least this one's now got something fancy going on now, right?
If people want a more "developer/designer" oriented post going into how I made it, I'd love to do that. There'd just have to be an interest for it. Unfortunately, I can't do much with feedback seeing as the codebase has already left my hands, but if you'd like to give any in regards to helping me improve on possible future projects similar to this, I'd love to hear it!
