italic type was the simplest way to track books and share the joy of reading with your ‘book people’
but until 2023, the only way to interact with your friends was through group reads (kind of like digital book clubs), and that barrier to entry was too high.
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lead product designer, partnering with our founders and researcher.
user testing, prototyping, testing, visual design, QA. -
our goal is to do social in a way it hasn’t been done before. we’re not interested in vanity metrics of engagement from a feed. we want italic type users to be able to keep their quiet nook on the internet, while still being able to send book recommendations, lists, and more to their true ‘book people’
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this project has been a labor of love, we’ve seen it go through many, many, many iterations, and i’m really happy where it’s netted out. it’s refreshing (and challenging) to work on a social feed that isn’t what you see in every other app.
We wanted to deepen user's relationships with their book people by transforming the act of logging books into a shared experience.
People were already logging books they were reading, and their TBR, when multiple friends wanted the same book, it became a natural opening for accountability and shared discovery.. We wanted low-pressure accountability without forced community. Users could see if someone they respected was also struggling to finish a book, they could open a dialogue about it. When deciding what to read next, friends' honest reviews could do the heavy lifting. Users would have multi-layer privacy settings to make sure the community aspect didn’t become a distraction the primary focus of the app.
We didn't want Italic type to turn into another social app. we found Most attempts at social reading end up competing with the reading itself, and we wanted the opposite, always maintaining a quiet corner of the internet that stays fully focused on your own reading journey.
From there, we built out distinct spaces depending on how much you wanted to engage. A separate feed surfaced prompts to go deeper with your book people when you were in the mood for it, and further out, discovery would help you find more of your book type, people, authors, and publications you admire. The principle underneath it all was restraint: social as a quiet layer added to enhance the experience, never one built to overpower it.
Unfortunately, this feature never made it past the concept stage. Italic Type ran out of funding before we could build and ship it.
