Northbound Press

2025 · Northbound · Design & engineering

A small literary magazine that needed to feel like paper and behave like a CMS. Issues, contributors, a shop that doesn't fight the reading.

A letterpress literary magazine open on a pale oak table in north light.

Next.js
Sanity
Tailwind

001 / The pile

The previous site was a theme with a shop bolted on. Issues were PDFs. Contributors had no home. The editors spent more time fighting WordPress than editing.

002 / The document

I treated an issue as a bound object: cover, contents, essays, poems, contributors. Portable text for the reading, not a page builder. Print and web share a content model so the magazine can go to press from the same source. Type is set for the page, not for a landing.

003 / After

Three issues shipped on the new stack. Direct subscriptions replaced a leaky Mailchimp form. The editors describe the Studio as 'finally a desk.'