Amazon Publishing

A home for great stories.

Amazon's publishing house provides a contemporary alternative for authors and agents seeking to share their stories. I designed a new website to highlight author success and featured books across 15 distinct imprints.

The project began with moodboards and visual sketches to explore how to represent APUB brand values on the web. I used Amazon’s Ember Serif font for some editorial-style typographic layouts, along with some friendly pops of color.

Keywords for the visual direction included creative, smart, and fun.

The final design emphasized people to build and support agent/author relationships, not sell books. Prominent author stories showcased their accomplishments, and imprint pages featured the editors working behind the scenes.

Data points throughout the site upheld Amazon’s brand differentiator in the industry. I designed a system for baseball-card style supporting info highlighting concrete business achievements below each book.

I made an animated spot illustration for this concept highlighting Kindle reading data.

After a quick design phase I worked with a developer to implement some of the signature moments on the site, like the bold mega-menu and footer navigation, simple templates allowing each of the 15 genre-based imprints to represent their unique personality, and special popovers for learning more about top books and editors.

Projects

Michael Weinstein

I’m a designer living in Cambridge, MA. I currently work at Blink as a Principal UX Designer, working on user-centered product design, design systems projects, envisioning design, and other UX/UI projects. I also enjoy working on branding, illustration, and graphic design. I’ve worked with clients like NASA, The New York Times, Amazon, HP, and ESPN.

I sometimes do freelance work, email me to talk about a project.