Field Notes

Field Notes is a fictional collective publishing long-form work about place, memory, and the more-than-human world. The brief was to make a website that felt like a printed object: warm paper, confident type, and enough room for a photograph to breathe.

The publishing team needed a system, not a one-off page. The design had to flex across essays, interviews, photo series, and short field notes without losing its voice.

The design uses a single editorial grid and lets the content change the rhythm. Essays can open with a full-bleed image, a pull quote, or a field note. The archive is organised by issue, place, and contributor rather than by an algorithm.

A custom search indexes titles, standfirsts, and tags client-side, so the archive stays fast without a database. Reading progress, footnotes, and captions are handled with small, purposeful interactions.

A static-first publishing pipeline with a headless CMS for the editors. The build stays light: semantic HTML, a small CSS system, and progressive enhancement for the motion layer.

GSAP adds a restrained page transition and scroll reveal; the rest is typography. The result loads quickly on a phone and still feels considered on a large display.