A New Look for All Lit Up
All Lit Up is a platform that connects readers to the best in Canadian independent publishing. When I joined the redesign effort, the site felt outdated and hard to navigate. Content was buried, visual structure was inconsistent, and the overall experience didn’t reflect the strength of the platform or its community.
The team wanted a site that felt modern, easier to use, and more reflective of their identity. I redesigned the interface from the ground up, bringing clarity, cohesion, and stronger visual storytelling to the forefront. The result was a cleaner, more usable website that helped readers explore books, authors, and literary features more intuitively.
This led to improvements in:
Information clarity
A simplified structure makes books, authors, and features easier to browse.
Visual cohesion
Flexible templates and a consistent UI create a more unified experience across desktop and mobile.
Brand continuity
Visual cues from the original identity are carried through while the overall look and feel is modernized.
Objective
Redesign the All Lit Up website from the ground up to create a cleaner, more discoverable browsing experience while modernizing the brand’s visual presentation. The new site needed to support book sales, storytelling, and events in a way that felt cohesive and easy to navigate.
Approach
The All Lit Up team came in with a clear goal: redesign the site to better reflect their identity and give it the personality it was missing.
I started with a full visual and UX audit, then created wireframes for every key screen. This included the homepage, product listings, blog layouts, and article templates.
Wireframes helped visualize structure early and align on layout before high-fidelity design.
While the team was open to a full rebrand, I chose to keep their existing logo and build around its vintage feel. I also repurposed artwork from their well-loved columns to bring more visual character to the blog.
Solution
With alignment on structure and tone, I moved into high-fidelity UI design and prototyping in Figma. Key improvements included:
A new homepage that balances editorial features with book discovery
A reorganized product taxonomy and filtering system to improve shopping flow
Fully responsive design across all screens
Flexible, modular templates that gave the team editorial control without sacrificing consistency
Mobile layouts were designed alongside desktop to provide a consistent experience across screen sizes.
Original and redesigned homepage.
Key Takeaway
Not every redesign needs to start from scratch. By building on the brand’s existing identity, we created a fresh, modern platform that feels both new and distinctly All Lit Up.
