Field Notes
Editorial Design
Duration:
3 Weeks
Industry:
Publishing
A quarterly print journal about craft, with a layout system that gives every story room to breathe.
Field Notes collects essays and photo stories from makers around the world. The editors wanted a format that feels personal and handmade without looking messy. We designed a flexible grid, a pairing of a warm serif and a sharp mono, and a set of page templates for essays, interviews and photo stories.
Before designing anything, we spent time with the Field Notes team to understand how they talk about their work, who they are trying to reach and what makes them different in publishing. We mapped their audiences, collected examples of what they liked and disliked, and agreed on a small set of principles that every decision would be measured against.
The final work was shaped through several rounds of sketches, prototypes and real-world tests. We checked every element in the places people would actually see it, refined the details that mattered most and removed anything that did not earn its place. The result is a system that feels considered and personal, and that the Field Notes team can confidently grow on their own.
Each issue has different contributors, image quality and story lengths. The layout had to adapt to all of it while keeping a strong identity from cover to colophon.
Like many teams in publishing, Field Notes had grown quickly and their materials had drifted apart over time. Different people had made different choices, and the result was a brand that felt inconsistent depending on where you met it. Fixing that without slowing the team down was a key part of the brief.
There were also practical limits. The budget and timeline were tight, and the team needed something they could maintain themselves after launch. Every idea had to be ambitious enough to make a real difference, yet simple enough to survive daily use by people who are not designers.
A twelve-column grid with generous margins gives the editors freedom inside clear rules. Templates speed up production, and a rotating cover colour gives each issue its own identity on the newsstand.
We documented everything in a clear, practical guide and built ready-to-use templates for the most common needs. Instead of a heavy rulebook, the guide focuses on a few core principles, real examples and simple do and don’t comparisons so anyone on the team can make good decisions quickly.
After launch we stayed involved for a few weeks to support the rollout, answer questions and fine-tune details based on feedback. Field Notes now has a foundation that feels like a true reflection of who they are, and the team reports that creating new materials is faster and far more consistent than before.