Margo came first.

Not the logo, not the color palette — the cat. Or more precisely, the typeface, which led to the cat, which led to everything else.

I'd been turning the brief over in my mind for a while — a classic, moody, cozy family-owned bookshop — circling around architectural motifs. A door with character. A window with warmth. Something that said this is a place worth entering and spending some time in. Nothing landed. And then I pulled up the Margo font duo by Jen Wagner — Margo Serif and Margo Script —and it was immediately, obviously right. Warm, literary without being stiff. The kind of typeface that belongs in a neighborhood bookshop.

And then I thought: the owners of a place like this would absolutely have a cat named after a typeface.

Margo lives at The Booknook. She has opinions. She communicates them with the point of her tail. She's been known to sit directly on the book you're considering, which is either a recommendation or a warning — it's hard to tell, and that's part of the charm. Her services are, of course, on the house.

Once I had Margo, I had the brand.

On the Logo

A flat logo wasn't going to work for a place like this. The Booknook isn't a website. It isn't a delivery service or an algorithm that knows what you read last. It's a room — a real one, with a cat in it — and the logo needed to feel like that.

I wanted depth and dimension. The sense that you could settle into it the way you settle into a good armchair. So in the block lockup, Margo doesn't sit on top of the type — she's in it. Her form interweaves with the letterforms, tail curling into the O, ears grazing BOOK from below. The type makes room for her, the way a good bookshop makes room for you.

In a world increasingly organized around screens and next-day delivery, there's something quietly radical about a place that just wants you to come in, find a book, and stay a while. The logo needed to carry that. Not loudly — just enough that you feel it.

On the fonts & colors

The Margo font duo is whimsical in a way that feels earned rather than affected. Literary and a little quirky, with just enough irregularity in the letterforms to feel like they were drawn by hand. Margo Serif handles the bookshop's name, signs in the shop, the things that need to be noticed. Margo Script handles the tagline and the quotes in the surface pattern — loose and warm, like a note left in the margin of a book you found in the used book section. Lora rounds out the system for body copy, quietly literary, notably readable.

The palette has a name: The Color Shelf. Six colors — Vellum, Colophon, Marginalia, Codex, Aldine, and Inkwell— all drawn from the language of books and printing. Deep plum that earns its place next to warm amber. A near-white so quiet it almost disappears. An olive that grounds everything without announcing itself.

The primary colorway puts Colophon forward — warmer, more approachable, the color of a well-loved spine. For darker applications, the palette runs deep — Vellum on Aldine, the colorway that feels like closing time, one lamp still on.

On the brand world

A logo is the beginning, not the whole thing. The Booknook needed a world to live in.

The literary quotes weren't part of the original concept — but somewhere along the way they became inevitable. The kind of idea that, once it arrives, feels like it was always supposed to be there. You'd find them everywhere: handwritten on chalkboards near the door, tucked onto shelf labels between the biographies, printed on small cards slipped into paper bags (or your delightful Booknook canvas bag) at checkout. Cortázar next to the travel section. Something dry and Austen-adjacent near the romances. A Borges quote somewhere you wouldn't expect it, because of course.

That's the kind of shop that earns regulars. Not because of the inventory — though the inventory matters — but because every visit turns up something you didn't notice the last time.

The tote carries all of this into the world. I didn't want just another bag with a logo on it — the kind that gets used twice and forgotten at the bottom of a drawer. I wanted something worth keeping. A conversation piece that people stop you on a sidewalk to ask about. So the block logo goes large and unashamed, and behind it runs a surface pattern of quotes in Margo Script — a tote covered in words, for a place built around them. Lorem Ipsum for now, real quotes waiting to be found and incorporated.

The brief called for cozy, classic, and moody. I leaned into cozy and classic and let Margo handle the moody. Cats are moody. She didn't ask to be on a logo. But she knows she's the main character, and she accepts the responsibility.

This is a place where you spread out, stay too long, and nobody minds.