what rebrand and website reskin with home page redesign
where & when thelab, 2016
why & how Young adult fiction publisher Swoon Reads, an offshoot of Macmillan imprint Feiwel & Friends, was expanding their focus from anything YA romance to all YA genres, and needed to update their brand identity to match.
A huge part of Swoon Reads is their community of YA readers and writers, so a huge part of understanding Swoon Reads was understanding that community, which meant understanding YA fandom, and what exactly a book nerd is. Swoon Reads director, Lauren Scobell was my guide on this journey (my GCD was already a book nerd, so well versed) — she knows her community in and out.
Once I was schooled on all things book nerd, we got to the fun stuff — creating the logo and choosing the color palette.
Partnering again with one of my favorites, Claire Purcell and I worked with Lauren to create a master style guide to serve as a comprehensive tool for all things Swoon Reads.
One key part of the guide was a set of rules to help designers play nice with the extensive color palette, including suggested pairings.
It's pretty amazing to see how much you can do with a reskin. My favorite part — the super awesome link hover action that our developer Brendan Berkley hooked up. Made me want to brush up on my CSS!
Probably, yes. But that doesn't mean that using InDesign to design for web is crazy, because it isn't. At all. I won't get all the way up on my soap box here, but since InDesign uses linked images and stylesheets, it actually is a much closer cousin to html/CSS then Photoshop, which was of course built for editing and retouching photos. InDesign has its own drawbacks, but overall it was an interesting and pretty successful experiment.
Designer and illustrator Kimmy Alexander out of thelab's Ohio office helped us recreate the Swoon Reads badge system to match the new brand style. Side note: I don't think I've said "super cute!" as much on any project, ever.
creative lead Anne Baker
group creative director Darci Manley
producer Nick Parisi
art director Emma Galli
illustrator Kimmy Alexander