Brand Identity & Full-Stack Platform
A brand-new independent publisher, built from zero: identity, a seven-palette genre system, and the full-stack platform behind it. Founded by author Karl Farrell and illustrator Lucy Simms, who refuse to treat words and pictures as separate projects.
01 — The brief
One conviction.
No legacy to build on.
Two crafts, one story.
Karl Farrell writes. Lucy Simms illustrates. They refused the standard publishing model that treats the words and the artwork as separate projects, handed off in sequence rather than built together.
"We wanted books where the writing and illustration are developed together, in conversation, from the very first idea."
Nothing existed yet.
No brand, no site, no back catalogue to lean on. A brand-new publisher choosing to invest in a proper identity and platform before the first book shipped, rather than launch on a template and patch it later.
The same conviction, different craft.
Apexify runs on the same refusal to separate disciplines: design, web, audio, video, and software, all under one roof and owned end-to-end by the same people. S&F needed a studio built the way they build books.
02 — The identity
An identity built
from nothing.
A hot-air-balloon mark for imagination, journey, and discovery. A warm, paper-adjacent palette. Two typefaces doing two jobs: one for display, one for reading.
Gold is an accent, never a text colour on light — it fails contrast set directly against the ivory ground, so it is reserved for fills and ornament only. Every pairing above was checked against WCAG before it shipped.
Weights 300/400/600, italic in the homepage hero. Carries the literary register the brand needed — a serif with confidence, not decoration.
Every paragraph, label, and interface element. Legible at small sizes across the catalogue, the reader accounts area, and the admin panel.
03 — The genre system
Same layout.
Different world.
Seven genre-specific palettes, each independently WCAG-audited, switched via a single [data-genre] attribute. The live site currently exposes eight genre filters. Put two books side by side and the layout doesn’t move — only the world does.
In their own words
Stories that take
you somewhere else.
The catalogue and a book page on mobile. The ivory ground, the gold, the italic display line, exactly as a reader meets them.
“Our mission is to bring exceptional stories to life with care, passion, and artistry — while building a supportive platform for talented authors and illustrators who share our commitment to quality and creativity.”
Karl Farrell & Lucy Simms, founders
04 — The platform
A studio they
can run themselves.
Their mission is to build a supportive platform for other authors and illustrators. That shows up as shipped infrastructure: author pages, and a CMS they can onboard people into without calling a developer first. On the other side of it, a reading experience built for people who come back.
Cloudflare, end to end.
Pages and Pages Functions for the app itself, no separate backend to run. D1 (SQLite, EU) holds content and accounts, R2 (EU) holds media. A standalone Worker handles cron-based scheduled publishing, since Pages Functions have no native cron.
React 19, built for speed and weight.
React 19, React Router 7, Vite 8. GSAP and Lenis for motion, plain CSS throughout. Build-time OG image generation with satori and resvg, responsive cover resizing with sharp. Most routes ship prerendered to real static HTML.
A bespoke admin panel.
Sanity was evaluated and set aside in favour of a purpose-built panel: book, news, and author CRUD with a draft, scheduled, and published workflow, bulk actions with deferred-commit undo, a media library, a contact inbox, GDPR-style customer export and erase, and real Cloudflare Web Analytics via GraphQL.
Built for readers who come back.
05 — The outcome
Rigour first.
Results, next.
This is a zero-to-one launch. There is no before, no traffic lift to point at, no conversion data to quote — there was nothing here before. What shipped is the proof: a brand, a platform, and an accessibility standard built into the palette itself.
A focus ring engineered for eleven backgrounds
No single colour cleared a 3:1 contrast ratio against all eleven palette backgrounds across the seven genre themes, so a two-tone focus ring was built specifically to hold up on every one of them. Every genre palette was re-verified per background, not once for the system as a whole.
A 1,282-line living audit log
Every accessibility decision and correction on the project is recorded in a design document that runs to 1,282 lines. Not a one-off pass — a standing record of the calls made and why.
Commerce, deliberately not live yet
Book pages link out to external retailers today; some read “Retailer links coming shortly.” Direct-sales checkout is built and scaffolded behind a kill switch, held back until S&F are ready to flip it on. Nothing here claims commerce that isn’t live.
No brand.
No site.
No before.
Identity, platform, and admin panel designed and built entirely by Adrian Majchrzak for Simms & Farrell Publishing. Live now at simmsandfarrellpublishing.com.
Visit the live site →