A La Karuta

Every letter hides in a picture. Now the website lets you find it.

A La Karuta is a hiragana karuta card game made by a Japanese teacher in Boston. Each picture card draws its letter as a word that starts with it: the う card is an eel, うなぎ, bent into the shape of う. The game was hard to understand from a product photo, so I redesigned the website around the idea itself, for parents, teachers and adult learners in the U.S. and Japan. On the home page, visitors pick a letter and tap the card to flip it and find the picture inside. On How to Play, they can try a quick memory match before they buy. English and Japanese pages, Amazon US and Japan buying paths, and search-ready structure complete the site.

Visit alakaruta.com ↗

Project: Client work (website redesign)
Location: Boston, Massachusetts
Website: alakaruta.com ↗
What I did: Website redesign & art direction
English & Japanese copy
Card-flip demo & memory-match game
Responsive front-end coding
SEO & structured data

A La Karuta home page: scattered hiragana karuta cards above the headline Play your way into Japanese, with Amazon US and Amazon Japan buttons — Home page, first view: Visit alakaruta.com ↗

Card flip: pick a letter, then tap the card to see the picture hiding in it.

Memory match: turn over two cards and pair each picture with its reading card. Play it ↗

Three phone screens of A La Karuta: the first view, the か card flipped to its frog picture, and the memory match with two pairs found — Designed mobile-first: both interactions work by tap.