Ann Brashares is the best-selling author of the Sisterhood of Traveling Pants series. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? With over 8 million books in the series sold and a movie spinoff this series is an absolute powerhouse that truly connected to a generation of girls.
Now Ann has a new book, The Here and Now, and Random House asked me to join them in recreating their site for Ann. They needed a new site that would play to the characteristics of the new book without alienating readers of the Pants books.
We started with the base design from her new book’s cover, utilizing subtly shifting shapes to show the depth and complexity of Ann’s writing. Since our target audience was teenage girls I brought in bright colors throughout the site, while keeping the rest of the layout and visual elements simple, sparse and clean. Each page has its own color scheme, adding visual excitement throughout.
The pages on the site are simple – but we still wanted to make sure they were as easy to update as possible. The videos page and books page were custom-built on the backend so that Random House just had a few fields to fill out and everything would work, even as the site scaled down for mobile devices. We simplified pages even more so that mobile users would have a pleasant and uncluttered experience.
Ann and the team at Random House loved the new, clean design and we were able to deliver a site that will exhilarate Ann’s readers for years to come.