HOW TO CREATE THE WORLD’S LARGEST BOOK CLUB

OVERVIEW

To celebrate the 700th anniversary of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Baylor University wanted to create the largest Dante reading group in history. The plan was to drive people to a site where they would sign up for daily emails featuring expert commentary and links to videos posted on YouTube.

This great idea had one major flaw: there was no reason to use the website after signing up. And yet, without a central hub, the project risked feeling disparate and insubstantial.

In our research, we also observed that most Dante-related websites felt old and stuffy. It was critical that our aesthetic should be inviting and fresh by comparison.

Contributions

Brand Strategy
Branding
Product Development
Marketing Strategy
Website Design & Development
Animated Trailer
Video Graphics Package
SEO
Email Drip Campaigns

Strategy

In The Divine Comedy, Dante takes readers into other worlds of darkness and light. Our vision was to create an interactive and immersive experience, where readers could explore the text with richness and depth. We took visual inspiration from the interplay of dark and light, and the artistic nature of not only Dante’s work, but the many illustrations and paintings it inspired across the centuries.

The website became a visually stunning invitation into Dante’s world, and a resource for readers to get more from the text. Videos and email content were posted on the site first, and cross linked to relevant material. Instead of simply sending out content via email and YouTube, we created a space that gave the whole project a proper home.

The success of the project has led to its recurring renewal each year since.

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OUR FAVORITE PART

The site features an innovative approach to navigation that gave users a choice of how to explore the world of The Divine Comedy. In addition to a global menu, we created a vertical left-hand navigation that allows users to navigate—or skip—straight to whatever they are looking for.