The brief
Rabbi Boruch Merkur translates and illustrates sacred texts — the Song of Songs, the Garden of Tanya, the Ten Plagues — as large-format coffee table books meant to be displayed, shared, and passed between generations. The books existed, the audience existed, but the digital presence didn't match the care that went into the physical product.
The ask: a unified publishing system — website, book catalog, weekly newsletter, and eventually interactive experiences — that felt as considered as the books themselves. One team, one design language, one source of truth.
The identity
The brand needed to feel like the books: reverent but approachable, rich but not ornate. We landed on a deep forest-green palette drawn from the illustrated artwork itself, paired with warm cream paper tones and restrained serif typography that lets the illustrations do the talking.
The identity system scales from a favicon to a full-bleed book spread — the same color relationships, the same typographic hierarchy, the same sense of considered quiet. Every touchpoint feels like it came from the same hand.
The website
Custom-built, no CMS layer, no WordPress. The site is static HTML engineered for speed — every page loads in under a second, images are art-directed and lazy-loaded at multiple resolutions, and the reading experience adapts cleanly from a 27" display to a phone held in one hand.
The collection page presents each volume as a full-bleed hero with original artwork, dual-language (Hebrew RTL + English LTR) text samples, and a direct path to purchase. The gallery page is a lightbox-driven showcase of the original illustrations — high-resolution, color-accurate, and built to make the art feel as present on screen as it does in print.
Key technical decisions
- No framework, no build step. Plain HTML + CSS + vanilla JS. The result is a site that loads instantly, requires zero maintenance, and will still work in ten years.
- Art-directed responsive images. Each illustration is served at the resolution the viewport needs — not a one-size-fits-all srcset, but hand-picked crops per breakpoint.
- Bilingual layout. Hebrew (RTL) and English (LTR) coexist on the same page without CSS hacks — logical properties throughout, direction set per block.
The newsletter
A weekly designed PDF — not an email blast with a stock template, but a laid-out publication with the same typography, color, and illustration treatment as the books and website. Each issue is generated from a shared content source, so updating the text in one place updates the newsletter, the site, and the catalog.
The game
Geula Quest is an interactive fiction experience built entirely from scratch — no game engine, no dependencies. Players roll a character, make choices that matter, and carry consequences forward across modular chapters. The first module, "The Sunken House," is a narrative descent that teaches through story rather than instruction.
It lives at the same URL, in the same design system, under the same brand — a game that feels like a natural extension of the publishing program rather than a bolted-on novelty.
The entire ecosystem — books, site, newsletter, game — feels like it was made by one person with one vision. That's the point.
The outcome
Tree of Life Books now has a complete digital publishing identity that matches the quality of the physical product. The website loads fast, ranks well, and converts visitors into readers. The newsletter keeps the community engaged weekly. And the interactive game opens the door to a younger audience who might not pick up a coffee table book on their own — but will spend an hour in a story.
The system is also extensible. When new titles are published, they slot into the existing catalog with zero design debt. When Reta Merkur's standalone art gallery needed its own home (The Merkur Collection), the same design language carried over — a sibling site, not a cousin.