Apartment One Announces Re-Design of Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project Website

Online, May 25, 2012 (Newswire.com) - Award winning creative agency Apartment One announces the re-design of Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project website. Rubin, New York Times best-selling author of The Happiness Project and the upcoming Happier at Home, sought out the expertise of Apartment One to create consistency across the multiple touch points of her rapidly growing The Happiness Project brand. The collaboration between Rubin and Apartment One stemmed from their mutual connection to Jacqueline Schmidt of Screech Owl Design, who created the illustrations featured on the new site design.

Known for their innovative and holistic branding and design work, Apartment One developed a top to bottom redesign of Rubin's existing website that reflects a new brand language built on the foundation of The Happiness Project book cover. "A core theme from The Happiness Project book is about simplifying life and organization and how they breed happiness. We realized there was a disconnect between this message and what users experienced on Rubin's previous website, which was content heavy and difficult to navigate," explains Spencer Bagley, Creative Director of Apartment One.

Challenged with making the website and book feel like they came from the same source, the Apartment One team deconstructed The Happiness Project book cover, utilizing its typography, color palette and graphic elements and translated them into a new web experience. Implementing structure, organization and hierarchy, the content on the site was re-organized to make it more accessible and easier to navigate and digest. Rubin's blog postings, the heart of her site, are now showcased front and center while other content is organized into modules that can be easily updated.

In addition to creating cohesion between The Happiness Project brand extensions, the Apartment One team also created infrastructure for the brand's future growth. "With online technology evolving so quickly, by the time you finish one aspect of a project you realize there's more you can do to tweak or update what you've already done. We're fortunate to have forward thinking clients like Gretchen who sees the journey of her brand as long-term and this site has laid the foundation for the next phase of her brand's evolution," says Liza Lowinger, CEO of Apartment One.

Rubin, who's receiving rave reviews from her loyal fan base on the re-designed site report that, "people are finding it much easier to use. And it looks much sharper, cleaner." She credits the success of the new site with the collaborative nature of her relationship with Apartment One. "Working with Apartment One has been a joy. It's such a pleasure to work with people who have the highest standards, who really know their stuff, who work professionally, and who want to make things beautiful."