Editorial Design

Studio Standard
Issue One

Overview

Self-Initiated
Editorial Design
2025

A self-initiated seasonal print magazine on fashion, art, design, and technology, taken from concept to bound print: editorial direction, layout, curation, and production.

Deliverables

Pure register. Long features in monochrome layouts with strong typographic structure. The Body Type article steps back to let the tension work.
Expressive register. Shorter pieces where color enters and the grid loosens, so each spread feels like a different room in the same building.
Typography system. Four faces across one magazine, range without noise.
Print production. Printed and hand-bound on the Canon ImagePress C710, with color, bleed, and paper tested on press rather than assumed from screen.

Process

01

Two Registers

Built the system around two poles, Pure and Expressive, using their contrast to pace the issue.

02

Typography as Tool

Chose four faces for tonal purpose, not variety: Creato Display, Switzer, Cooper Hewitt, and Sentient.

03

Curation & Production

Sequenced thirteen contributors to the theme, then proofed and hand-bound the issue at SCCA.

Background

Problem

The system had to flex inside while staying coherent outside. An editorial identity has to make calls a grid can't: what to cover, how to frame it, which stories get room and which get to experiment. Studio Standard needed a language that could carry a long critical essay and a short provocative piece in the same issue without either feeling out of place.

Solution

A two-register system that uses both poles instead of picking one. Pure is monochrome and typographic, and it runs the long features where the writing leads. Expressive is color-forward and image-heavy, and it runs the short pieces where the page can take risks. The split is how editorial designers handle pacing, with the visual temperature rising and falling against the content.

Research & Audience

It's aimed at readers who treat culture as something to analyze, not just consume. Not casual browsers, but people who read for the thinking behind the work and the links between fashion, art, design, and technology that single-subject magazines tend to miss. They expect a point of view, not just a look.

Issue One's theme, "The Curated Self," set the tone early: identity as a construction project, read through body-as-typography, AI companionship, colonial portraiture, and the cowboy as camp.

Project Details

Client: Self-initiated. Editorial Design class project

Tools: Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop

Skills: Editorial design, creative direction, content curation, typography, print production, project management

Role: Creative direction, all layout, content curation, contributor coordination, print production

Typefaces: Creato Display, Switzer, Cooper Hewitt, Sentient

Print: Printed and bound at SCCA Seattle on the Canon ImagePress C710

Contributors: 13 across writing, photography, and editorial

Outcome

Designed as a real magazine, not a class deliverable, and that difference showed up in every decision.

Next project
Seattle Asian Art Museum
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