Luisa Carrada

Luisa Carrada's site was created together with graphic designer Marzia Bianchi, who handled its architecture, visual concept, logo, photos and design. I focused on development: the custom WordPress theme and, above all, the blog, which is the heart of Luisa's work. The challenge was to give a very large writing archive a home worthy of someone who lives by writing.

The client

Luisa Carrada is a business writer and professional writing teacher. She was among the first in Italy to practise this profession: her first site was the first Italian site about professional writing, and since then she has written eight books and more than 1,600 blog posts. She helps organisations, from banks to insurers, from large public bodies to tourism portals, simplify their language, restructure their documents and write for their readers, through consulting and writing workshops.

Architecture and technologies

The site is WordPress with a theme built from scratch on Marzia's design, with no page builders or off-the-shelf themes. Each page template matches a page of the design: Luisa's introduction, the business writing services, the workshops, the books, the clients, the contacts and the blog. A custom theme makes it possible to respect the design without compromise and keep the code light, because the site contains only what it really needs.

My work

A blog built for readers

Luisa's blog is an archive of years of articles, and it is the tool she uses to share what she studies and tries out about writing. I developed the templates for articles, listings and series, such as "Testi maestri", the micro-lessons that analyse texts by the greats of journalism, literature and copywriting. For a site about writing, typography is the content: line length, heading hierarchy and spacing were treated with the same care as the text.

A collage design on WordPress

Marzia's design works in collage: cut-out photos, letters from the logo, shapes and illustrations that overlap. I translated these compositions into the theme so they stay faithful on every screen, and so Luisa can update text and content from the dashboard without touching the layout.

The outcome

Luisa has a site that resembles her, where form and tone of voice are aligned, and a blog she can keep feeding on her own. Working with Marzia was a natural split of roles: she gave shape to the idea, I turned it into a solid WordPress site that is easy to use every day.