Rebrand and Web Design for an Acclaimed Literary Magazine

Solstice Literary Magazine had built decades of literary credibility, but its website hadn’t kept pace with the brand’s reputation. The existing platform was dated, difficult for editors to maintain, and disconnected from the marketing and reporting tools the team needed to understand its audience. On top of that, the magazine relies on periodic giving drives to fund operations, and the site had no real donation experience — just a generic, bolted-on payment link that undersold the mission and made it hard to track campaign performance. The result was a brand that read as more dated online than its award-winning content deserved, and a giving process that left money and data on the table.

• Legacy platform that was slow, hard to update, and visually out of step with the brand’s stature
• No cohesive visual identity tying the digital presence to the magazine’s editorial reputation
• Marketing and analytics tools running disconnected from the site, limiting visibility into readership and campaigns
• A generic donation flow with no campaign tracking, poor conversion, and no support for recurring or drive-specific giving
• An editorial team that needed a CMS they could actually manage without engineering help

The result is a digital presence that finally matches the caliber of the magazine’s writing, and a giving program the team can actually run and measure.

• A modern, on-brand site that reflects the publication’s award-winning reputation
• An editorial team empowered to publish and manage content independently
• Unified reporting across marketing and web analytics, giving leadership real visibility into readership and campaign performance
• A dedicated donation workflow that made giving drives easier to launch and track — driving a >200% lift in campaign giving
• A platform built to scale with the publication’s next decade of growth