Preserving and celebrating a legacy for current and future fans.

After his death in 2020, the family of John le Carré (aka David Cornwell) setup an estate responsible for maintaining the legacy of John's literary catalogue as well as managing the intellectual property rights for his work. 16i were approached by the estate looking for a website befitting of le Carré's work, that could be used to provide a destination for various audiences to come and find information about him, from fans to third parties interested in licensing intellectual property rights.

They tasked us with creating a site that would act as an archive of his books, written work and biography of his life, share the adaptations for film, television and theatre and as an updates platform to keep fans and interested parties up to date on the latest news, including announcing new literary works created in the world of le Carré.

The estate didn't want to follow the tropes of other authors websites. They wanted something that was uniquely themed to feel like users were entering the world of espionage and le Carré. We worked closely with their team to define the tone and creative direction. With the novels released and spanning almost 60 years of history, distilling this down to a tone and aesthetic was a challenge. We opted for a more classic era of espionage in style, with folders containing photos and documents, data tapes, filing cabinets etc to root the tone in the cold war era which le Carré often chose as the setting for his novels.

In the background we wanted to ensure the information architecture was setup to link different parts of the content together. Items such as Novels referring to their Film and TV adaptations and vice-versa, even characters, locations and actors all interlinked to create a rich data structure that could be enhanced and built upon in the future.