Cantilever Press
Cantilever Press is an independent Australian publisher of books on landscape, architecture and design.
Cantilever Press is an independent Australian imprint publishing books on landscape, architecture and design. Its first title, Secret Gardens: Designing Private Realms, is a 324-page cloth-bound book of twenty of Australia's most private gardens, curated by Matthew Cantwell, founder of the Sydney landscape practice Secret Gardens.
A new imprint launching its first book needed a store that sells two ways at once: copies direct to readers, including pre-orders ahead of the first print run, and stock to bookshops and design retailers at trade prices. For a publisher built on the idea that a design book should be an object worth keeping, the site also had to feel as considered as the book.
We designed and built the store on Shopify around the book itself, in a warm palette of cream, olive and soft brown, with the book's photography and soft leaf shadows throughout. The homepage leads with the cover and a pre-order button, then walks through what's inside: a look-inside preview of the spreads, the cloth binding, large format and screen-printed cover, and the studio behind it. The product page adds a grid of all twenty gardens and a table of the book's details, and the Our Story page introduces the imprint, Secret Gardens and the people who run it.
Booksellers get their own path. A bar across the top of every page invites them to open a trade account, through an application form that asks for their ABN and what they stock, with trade pricing and terms once they're registered. Shipping and returns pages cover pre-orders, delivery times across Australia and orders from overseas, and every page was designed for phones as well as desktop.
