sshhh! This is a working library.

Role: Client Creative Director

W. W. Norton & Company is the oldest and largest publishing house owned wholly by its employees. Founded in 1923, Norton has published classics by Sigmund Freud, Vincent Bugliosi, A.R. Ammons, Seamas Heaney, Michael Lewis, and many others.

At the beginning of this project, I engaged Happy Cog to perform a structural redesign, beginning with an overhaul of the site’s architecture, extending through a high-level content strategy, and concluding with a beautiful visual design. From there, I lead a small in-house team to select and implement a new content management system, managed the migration of data for over 5,000 books, enacted new workflows for content creation, and designed and developed additional templates. Along the way I served variously as creative director, information architect, content strategist, web writer, front-end developer, and project manager.

Since the relaunch in August 2009, I remain the design director of the site, overseeing the roll-out of additional features, responding to the business needs of the company, and organizing ongoing user testing—all in an effort to make the experience of the site as rich and rewarding as the books it contains.