Case Study: Insta Novels

The brief

The New York Public Library [NYPL] was looking for new ways to further their mission to provide free and open access to their collection. So a team from Mother NYasked themselves what a 21st Century library should really look like.

“The brief was their mission statement: providing free and open access” Mother NY Art Director Lauren van Aswegen explains “We looked at how do we meet the users where they are – and that is on Instagram.”

The idea

The process of adapting novels to a dynamic social media platform would prove to be far more challenging than coming up with the idea. As van Aswegen explains: “You’d think that it would be easy, just upload a whole book onto the platform. But that’s when you encounter the constraints and restrictions, and they allow you to create innovative social media campaigns.”

The idea of this award-winning digital marketing campaign was to not just publish the books but to bring them to life through animation. Using Instagram’s ‘Stories’ product, each book would appear on the NYPL’s page as a ‘highlight’, meaning users could come back and read at any time.

To begin with this creative Instagram Stories campaign, the team at Mother NY chose a series of books that were over 70 years old, and thus had no copyright restrictions. They would begin by adaptingAlice in Wonderland(Lewis Carroll),The Yellow Wallpaper(Charlotte Perkins Gilman), andThe Metamorphosis(Franz Kafka). These would be followed byThe Raven(Edgar Allan Poe) at Halloween, andA Christmas Carol(Charles Dickens) at Christmas. Each book was chosen not only for its literary quality but for the fact that their themes relate to contemporary times.

Production

With the idea and choice of novels approved, work could begin on bringing them to life.

Mother NY wanted to maintain consistency across the books, as well as with the NYPL’s existing brand. They began by developing a set of brand guidelines which felt in tune with the Library’s identity (devised initially by Marc Blaustein). It was adapted for the digital platform, with a lighter-weight version of brand typeface Founders Grotesk.

The next step was to figure out how a book should manifest on Instagram. Deciding on a body copy typeface would clearly be a significant decision; each book needed to fit into a maximum of 198 pages – another criterion for the Stories format – so legibility in small size was paramount. “We felt that Georgia was well designed for small screens” explains van Aswegen “ and - being a serif font - was anhomage to the books themselves, with good legibility”.

Then came choosing the animators: “We didn’t want to go with expected pairings. For example, we loved César’s colourful style for synonymously dark bookThe Metamorphosis. This approach created a fresh angle for each book.“

The covers would be the main calling card, advertising the books. “We had 10 seconds where we could show the cover of a book, so we treated them like mini-trailers for the book, that’s how we briefed the animators.”

But the format ofthis Instagram Stories campaign also provided some other interesting challenges. For example, Stories moves onto the next film every ten seconds, so users need to be informed to hold their finger on the page to prevent this from happening. This opened up a whole new opportunity for the illustrators, as van Aswegen describes: “It’s fascinating how each animator took a different concept for this creative use of Instagram Stories. So inA Christmas Carol, the candle illustration melts as you move through each page.”

Given the nature of user behaviour on Instagram, restraint became a core part of the animation brief. “We learned very quickly that the more complicated the animation, the worse it was. So we had to pull back the animation a lot, which was hard as they were coming out with beautiful things, but you have to realise that a user is going through Instagram so quickly you have to make simple."

One final touch was commissioning an original composition for the books’ soundtrack. Remarkably, the sounds in the piece were all taken from books - opening, closing and tearing.
Getting the books onto the platform itself would be the final challenge - as Instagram only allowed manual uploads: a team effort made it possible.

The response

The books were launched in August 2018 to a universally enthusiastic response from users and the press alike. And the metrics followed suit - the NYPL gained 13,000 new Instagram followers in the first 24 hours, and over ten times that number in the months since, leading to 300,000 people having read the books. Needless to say, Insta Novels has become one of the best Instagram Stories examples in the creative industries.

Along with the gushing response, and huge metrics, the project won four pencils at D&AD Awards 2019: Wood in Art Direction and Digital Marketing, and Graphite in Creativity for Good and Book Design. For van Aswegen though, the most rewarding part was “the positive responses we got from authors, up-and-coming publishers, teachers using it in their classrooms, and even people who had been inspired to launch their first novel the same way.”

For more award-winning campaigns check out theD&AD Awards winners. If you are looking for inspiration and creative insights on how the most popular advertising campaigns and creative design projects are made, read more creative case studieshere.