Afterglo is a new online shop focused on sex wellness. It offers a wide range of products related to sexuality, like sex toys, intimate care, etc. Their motto is to help people explore their sensuality and offer them anything they need to be at ease with their body and desires. The online shop has different categories that help browsing their products, with labels wide enough to give ideas and broaden one’s experience, like “In the Mood” and “Body Parts”, for example. Furthermore, the website aims at creating a community of customers, in order to show either sex-related art or sexual advice.
The design of the website was in the hands of Louis Paquet. He used soft pastel colors and beautiful nude pictures, mostly details of body parts. This smooth approach welcomes the user and conveys a feeling of familiarity as different body types are shown, as well as people in natural attitudes. The products are also photographed like cosmetics, so the website gives an overall feeling of self-care to the user, and is far from the pornographic imagery of sex shops, always evoking something forbidden. The website is set in Cardinal Fruit from Production Type and Aeonikfrom CoType Foundry. The serif is used in caps for titles and in mixed case for introductory texts: the sophistication of Cardinal Fruit works well with the products and with the theme of sexuality: its delicate design echoes floral patterns, and genitals have often been represented in the history of art in analogy to flowers (for example in Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs). Aeonik adds a more “medical” voice, as all the products on the platform are chosen for their quality and hypoallergenic requirements.
Last but not least, the website has a special “vibrator mode” in the “(Vibes)” section: once you click on it, the browser window begins to vibrate while 3D-modeled sex toys appear and began floating on screen. A nice gadget that brings the sex experience a little closer.