Random House had seen my work creating author websites for other writers, and they contacted me one day to ask if I would create a new site for one of their authors. Little did I know it would be for Markus Zusak, author of the hugely successful The Book Thief, a book that was about to premiere as a movie in a few short weeks. In fact that’s why Random House was calling me – they needed his new site ready by the premiere.
Knowing that this opportunity was too good to pass up I said yes and we got started immediately creating a place for all things Book Thief.
The design of the site based off of the original hardcover books, and deeply textured like Markus’ writing. It uses a distinguished leather-bound background to set a rich tone, while gold text is set off like an embossed tomb.
Markus is heavily active on a variety of social networks, so we made sure those feeds were all pulled in to keep the site updated and alive. They were each customized to make the entire site fit together smoothly. And of course Random House knew that with Markus’ main readership being young adults a responsive site that worked beautifully on mobile devices was a must.
After this project went so well I was able to continue teaming up with Random House on a few more great projects, including new author websites for Ann Brashares, James Dashner, and Lauren Kate.