Librairie Stephan

Rebranding a Book & Publishing Juggernaut.

Librairie Stephan is a local Lebanese bookseller, distributor, and publisher. This family business has been up and running since 1956. Their bookshops offer a wide range of books: from children’s to coffee table, to novels and textbooks. As publishers, they mainly publish in Arabic, while as distributors they share children’s, architecture and cook books across the Middle East and North Africa.
We designed and developed Librairie Stephan’s website around intuitive e-commerce features, completing its transition from traditional brick and mortar shop to a state of the art omnichannel bookstore, complete with its own blog. Once the website was fully functioning, our content team held a series of workshops for Librarie Stephan’s team of booksellers to teach them how to develop their own editorial strategy, and how to write for online.
Check out their website here.

Visual ID

The Libraire Stephan team came to us when they decided that it was time to make the transition towards online. The challenge here was translating over 60 years of history into an agile digital brand. We needed to maintain some sort of visual coherence as to not put off regular customers, all the while appealing to a younger tech-savvy demographic. Our team handled every aspect of the Librairie’s Stephan digital transition. With the rest of the Keeward Group team, we conceived and implemented the new brand articulations. This allowed us to align functionality and design.

Collaterals

This collaboration kicked off with a lifting of the Librairie Stephan logo. As a throwback to the brand’s previous logotype, we kept the same shade of royal blue, that has come to be synonymous with their name, while adding a modern twist to it.  
The choice of font case was a key point in crafting the brand identity. We conceived the “S” of Stephan to act as a mascot for the brand while incorporating quotation marks in its construction in order to reference literature and the publishing industry. We used these quotation marks as a basis, and created a pattern out of them, which we spread out across different collaterals, like shopping bags, letterheads, and the bookshops’ storefronts.