Design study · Scholarly press · South Dakota
A publisher's website shaped like a publisher's list
A new-website concept for a small scholarly press whose product is 113 books and 56 volumes of a quarterly journal — where the design problem is showing a whole list at once.
Concept only, responding to RFP #26RFP19895. The catalog, journal run, and staff are harvested from the Press's published site, and no publication date is shown unless it is genuine; this is not the official South Dakota Historical Society Press website.
- Publisher website design
- WordPress + WooCommerce
- Backlist browsing
- True-trim covers
- Variable type
- WCAG 2.2 AA
SD Historical Society Press — open the working site
Case study overview
The problem
A press with a deep backlist is badly served by ecommerce defaults. Uniform thumbnail grids paginated thirty at a time make a 113-title list feel like a warehouse, and a reader browsing a scholarly press is doing something closer to walking a shelf than searching a catalog. Worse, forcing every cover into one aspect ratio quietly lies about the books: a landscape picture book and a six-by-nine monograph are different objects, and cropping them to match erases the thing a reader uses to tell them apart.
The approach
The homepage is the publishing season rather than a landing page — current titles at full jacket size, then the Press's own four named series, each with its editorial remit intact. The Shelf draws the entire backlist as a wall of spines standing on shelf boards, with each spine's width taken from its real page count and its fill from that jacket's dominant inked colour, so the whole list is legible in one view. Every cover renders at its true trim, so proportions stay honest. Fraunces and Faustina are self-hosted with a real optical-size axis, over a bookcloth oxblood chosen specifically for its absence from the catalog's own cover colours, so the site's chrome never competes with a jacket.
The result
A 120-page build on real WordPress and WooCommerce covering 113 titles, four series, 56 journal volumes, and 827 free article PDFs, WCAG 2.2 AA with zero axe violations.
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