Fieldnotes Quarterly
Redesigning a thirty-year-old architecture journal without losing a single loyal reader.
- Client
- Fieldnotes Architecture Quarterly
- Year
- 2025
- Discipline
- Editorial
- Role
- Art direction, editorial design, typography
Case study
The brief
Fieldnotes has published long-form architecture criticism since 1995. Its readers are devoted, its layouts had aged, and the editors were nervous: every earlier attempt at a redesign had been met with a wave of complaint letters.
The approach
We kept what readers loved, the generous margins and the uncompromising essays, and rebuilt everything around them. A new twelve-column grid gives photography room to breathe, a serif tuned for long reading carries the text, and a quiet system of margin notes lets architects’ sketches sit beside the argument instead of being banished to an appendix.
The best compliment came from a subscriber of twenty years, who wrote in to ask what had changed.
The outcome
The first redesigned issue sold out its print run. Subscriptions grew by 22 percent over the following year, and for once the letters page filled up with compliments.
