I led art direction and visual strategy for Medium’s Forge Magazine, a publication  about our collective desire for happiness and self-actualization.




Overview


Forge Magazine is one of Medium’s nine O&O publications, each with its own distinct brand, voice, and audience. This initiative was aimed at converting readers into subscribers by offering in-house, premium content.


To represent the pioneering spirit and intellectual pursuit of our readers, we translated the brand into a visual language centered on bold, confident typography and highly saturated, digital colors.





Design Direction

As the brand font, Syne offered an unconventional and expressive flare within its letterforms. Sohne was chosen as a more neutral subhead font. Post Grotesk served as the font for body copy to priortize legibility on the platform.


In addition to a distinct brand voice, I developed a bespoke art direction strategy that felt uniquely Forge. 





Art Direction

We curated and art directed the in-house illustration style to visually embody the Forge brand. We comissioned illustrators to lean into abstract, rather than figurative, representation while using a technical line and a highly saturated color palette.

We hired and coached non-editorial illustrators in many of their first editorial comissions, often yielding unique and surprising results.



When commissioning illustrators, animators and photographers, I directed our art directors to focus on hiring underrepresented voices and emerging talent.





Forge’s Guide to Networking - Package



Forge published a variety of packages, each centered around a theme. The Forge Guide to Networking can be taken at its surface as a self-help guide to networking, but at its heart is about our desire for connection and community.

Illustrations for this series were created by creative Michael Rubin as his first foray into editorial work. His approach playfully elicited the emotional subtext underpinning each of the scenarios and stories covered in the series.






You vs. Your Inbox - Package

Forge published a package to give expert advice on how to manage one’s inbox and send better emails.






How to Think Without Googling - Long Form

The digital age has changed the way we think. What if we shut off our notifications, stopped answering emails and quit listening to podcasts at 1.5x-speed? We would revert to a time when our relayed on our brain to categorize and recall knowledge.







Joint Accounts - Column

Joint Accounts is a weekly advice column on finance and relationships from writer Kristin Wong.





How to Write Anything

A series where Forge give tips, tricks, and principles for writing all the things we write in our daily lives online.




Forge was produced at Medium by an in-house team of editors, writers, designers, and photographers. 




Credits


Project: Forge Magazine
Client: Medium
Launch: 2019
EIC: Indrani Sen
Design Manager: Ryan Hubbard
Photography Lead: Xenia Rollinson
Art Direction Lead: Jovanna Tosello
Art Directors: Jovanna Tosello, Dora Godfrey, Renald Louissaint
Designer:
Renald Louissaint