Zando publishes across a dozen imprints that share almost nothing on the surface. Tin House puts out literary fiction with prize ambitions, SJP Lit is Sarah Jessica Parker's imprint for eclectic, big-hearted fiction, and Crooked Media Reads is home to sharp books from leading voices in progressive politics. Alongside them run romance, thrillers, memoir, and more. None of that range is an accident, and it's Zando's biggest asset. We wanted to build a platform and brand that could show all of it off at once. But one stakeholder noted that while people might know a piece of Zando, like the SJP imprint or the Slowburn books, the Zando-wide identity hadn't been nailed. The old site couldn't hold the whole catalog together, and it couldn't keep up with a company that had just acquired Tin House and was still growing.
The organizing idea came from the client, who described Zando as a big house where each room has its own flavor and everyone's a happy bunch together. We made that literal. Rather than flatten Zando's range into one tidy container, we built it a house with different rooms.
The identity is a bold, warm system built on the Simula typeface for impact and GT Pressura for body, in a palette that runs from a near-black navy Zando calls Erebus to bright Valorous blue. It flexes across imprints. Each one gets a landing page distinct enough that even a reader who's never heard of it can sense its character on arrival. Custom intros, spot color, featured books and press, imprint-specific newsletter signups. The taste that links the imprints stays legible while the personality that separates them holds.
Just like in a bookstore, Zando's readers shop for new reading material by mood, not ISBN. So alongside the standard filters, we built Browse by Vibe, a set of collections like Cozy Horror, Enemies to Lovers, Morally Gray Moms, and Weird Grief that cut across imprints and surface the connections a genre filter would miss. We also reframed book pages as rich homepages for each book rather than utilitarian detail pages, pulling the excerpt, praise, author, events, related reads, and the metadata a buyer actually needs into one place. The result is discovery that behaves like a good bookseller's recommendation instead of a feed.
Behind the warmth is a system built to scale. Zando's catalog already lives on Penguin Random House's infrastructure, so we made that the single source of truth. An integration with Zando's MyHouse system syncs new and updated titles, covers, descriptions, metadata, ISBNs, and praise straight into the site on a daily sync or a manual trigger, so the team stops re-entering what already exists elsewhere. We built it on Craft CMS for a flexible editorial experience with real-time preview. The hard parts are automated, which leaves the team free to do the part only they can do, which is grow Zando.
A catalog this broad doesn't need to be simplified to be coherent. It needs a home wide enough to hold all of it, and a system underneath that keeps that home current without a fight.
