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Editorial | 2023

Saffron Mag case study.

Client
Saffron Quarterly
Year
2023
Role
Art Director
Category
Editorial

The brief.

The problem. A quarterly food-and-culture magazine wanted to stop looking like a Sunday supplement and start looking like the kind of object people leave on coffee tables for months.

The solution. We rethought every spread from grid up — generous serif body, concentric-circle visual motif tying covers to feature openers, full-bleed photography, and a pull-quote treatment that became the magazine's signature.

"Three issues in, we're getting newsstand requests from cities we don't even distribute in yet."- Editorial Team
How it came together

The process.

Three phases. No hand-waving. Here is how the work actually got made.

Step 01

Discover

Deep-dive sessions, audience research, and a clear-eyed audit of what was working and what was not.

Step 02

Concept

Multiple directions explored in parallel - typography, palette, mark variations - then narrowed to one.

Step 03

Build

Production-grade systems, asset libraries, and the toolkit the in-house team uses every day after launch.

Results

What happened.

Numbers from inside the first months of the relaunch. Not vanity - actual business outcomes.

+143%
Newsstand pickups
Vs. the issue before the redesign.
5,200
New subscribers
Net new in the first quarter post-redesign.
Top 10
Indie magazine list
Listed by Stack as a 2024 pick of the year.