All work
Concept project — self-initiated, not a client commission
Case study 02 / 06
Fieldnotes Journal
A fictional independent journal about objects, places and the people who make them — designed to feel considered in print and quick on a phone.
Sector
Culture & publishing
Disciplines
Art direction, Editorial, Identity
Year
2026
Status
Concept / demo
Mood reference — photo by Maks Styazhkin on Unsplash. Not a final campaign asset.
01
The challenge
Small publications either copy glossy magazines or disappear into minimalism. Fieldnotes needed a voice recognisable from across a room, without overpowering the writing and photography it exists to serve.
02
The strategy
Treat every issue like a field notebook: an honest, working document. The identity is a set of rules for observation — date, place, object — rather than a decorative style.
03
The approach
An oversized masthead set against generous margins, a modular grid that flexes from single-image spreads to dense indexes, and a digital edition that keeps the same rhythm in a single column.
04 — Visual decisions
Why it looks
the way it does
Type: High-contrast serif for features, mono for captions and field data.
The margin is the brand
Consistent, generous margins become the recognisable signature across print, web and social.
Captions as content
Mono-set “field data” captions (place, date, material) turn metadata into a reading layer.
Paper-toned digital
The web edition uses warm paper tones rather than pure white to stay continuous with print.
Concept palette
#40291F
#F1D8C9
#FAF6EF
#B5674A
Reference — photo by Saturday Books on Unsplash
05 — Deliverables
01Masthead & identity
02Editorial grid system
03Cover templates
04Digital edition layout
05Caption & style guide
06 — Outcome
This is a concept, so there are no real-world results to report — and we won’t invent any. If it went live, these are the signals we’d agree to measure from day one:
Average reading time per feature
Return readers between issues
Subscriber sign-ups from the digital edition
