Interactive Web Experience for Folio Publishing

Against the Catalogue

Most publisher websites are catalogues. Products listed, categories applied, filters available, checkout process completed. The logic is retail logic: efficient, indexable, conversion-optimized. It is also, for a literary publisher whose entire purpose is to help readers find books they didn’t know they needed, almost entirely wrong.

Folio Publishing House came to us with a clear conviction: their website should feel like their best books feel. Surprising. Layered. Worth slowing down for. The brief was to build a digital reading environment, not a digital shop.

The Editorial Architecture

The structural decision that shaped everything else was to organize the site by reading experience rather than by genre or publication date. We developed a taxonomy of eight experiential categories — categories like “books for long journeys,” “books that change what you notice,” “books best read twice” — that describe the experience of reading rather than the content of the book.

This taxonomy required extensive editorial collaboration with Folio’s team. Every title in their catalog was placed, through careful discussion, into one or more experiential categories. The process took three months and was, according to Folio’s editorial director, one of the most generative conversations the team had ever had about their catalog.

Design as Reading

The visual design of the site treats the reading experience as primary. Text is set at sizes and line lengths optimized for screen reading, not for information density. Pages have room to breathe. The transition between sections is paced like chapter breaks, not like navigation.

Each book’s page is a designed object in its own right — a micro-environment tailored to the book’s specific character. A novel with a dense, maximalist prose style gets a correspondingly rich, detail-laden page treatment. A spare, minimalist work gets white space and restraint.

Interaction with Purpose

Every interactive element in the site serves a reading-related purpose. A text excerpt viewer lets readers sample writing before committing. An “editor’s annotation” feature layers editorial commentary onto excerpt pages. A “reading journal” feature lets registered readers keep private notes and quotes.

The frontend is built for performance and accessibility. Every page meets WCAG AA standards. Core Web Vitals scores are in the top decile for publishing sites. The reading experience is as good on a seven-year-old mobile phone as on a high-resolution desktop.

Time on site increased 84% post-launch. Direct sales grew 37% year-over-year. But the metric Folio cares most about: readers are discovering books they hadn’t searched for at a rate 52% higher than before.