Dual-Brand Website and Business System for Kit de Waal

Client: Kit de Waal, bestselling author of My Name Is Leon Scope: Full website redesign · Dual-brand architecture · Copywriting · Wix build · KIT Platform Connection Role: Design, build, copy, and project management

Kit de Waal is one of Britain's most loved literary voices: Women's Prize longlisted, on the GCSE curriculum, adapted by the BBC. Her website needed to do two very different jobs at once. Readers arrive for the books, the events, the interviews. Writers arrive for Writing Kit, her creative writing courses, which need to work commercially with clear pricing and enrolment.

Most author sites solve one of these and sabotage the other. The brief was explicit: readers should never feel sold to, and aspiring writers should never feel gatekept. Warm without being folksy, confident without being corporate, and unmistakably hers.

There was a second challenge. An earlier design direction had missed the mark, and the client's feedback was direct about it. The project needed more than a redesign. It needed to rebuild confidence, feedback round by feedback round.

Two strands, one house. I designed a dual-brand system: the author side in warm parchment, Baskerville and Avenir, with a single orange accent, quiet and editorial in the register of the literary sites Kit admires. The Writing Kit side in white and teal with Playfair Display and Inter, warmer and more active, built to sell courses in plain language with the price and the bursary place given equal prominence.

Feedback as a system, not a mood. Every round of client notes, 23 numbered points at its fullest, was tracked, executed, and answered point by point. Judgment calls were named, never silent. Where instructions conflicted with the brief, I flagged the conflict and asked rather than guessed. The turnaround in client confidence came from exactly this: nothing was ever lost, and nothing was ever quietly reinterpreted.

Craft in the details. Custom HTML sections for the awards and roles, typeset like the prize page of a well-made book. Per-book buy links verified against publishers and retailers. Video strategy corrected for SEO. Editorial copywriting across seven pages in the author's own registers: third person for the site, first person for her story, plain language for the courses.

Alongside the redesign, the client commissioned a second project: building the business infrastructure behind Writing Kit on the Kit platform (formerly ConvertKit) — fittingly, Kit's platform running on Kit.

The website tells the story; this system does the selling. I set up payments for her online products, so a writer can go from course page to enrolled without friction, and built the email list architecture to grow her audience between launches: capture on the site, sequences behind it, and a clean path from free subscriber to course participant.

Together, the two projects mean the site and the business behind it were designed as one system rather than bolted together: the editorial front of house and the commercial engine room, each doing its job without compromising the other.

A site that reads like the author it belongs to — and now transacts like a business. Readers move from books to events to conversations without a whisper of selling. Writers find courses in plain English, price and funded bursary place side by side, and can enrol, pay, and stay connected through one integrated system.

And the feedback arc tells its own story: from a difficult first review to a second commissioned project and sign-off built on trust.