An investigation into what happens when a type scale and a spatial grid share the same numerical origin.
Design
A logotype developed without a brief, for an organisation that does not yet exist but perhaps should. The mark needed to carry authority without history — a difficult thing to fake, and an interesting constraint to design around.
A limited publication of six typographic systems derived from a single dataset, set by hand.
A browser-based tool for navigating historical documents without a predetermined sequence. Built on the premise that an archive is not a library — retrieval and discovery are different acts, and the interface should know the difference.
Notes from a year of self-directed practice: what changes when no client is waiting.
The same two letters. Twelve interpretations. Only two survive the test of reduction to 16px. The exercise became less about the letterforms and more about what legibility actually demands — and how much of what we call style is just failure that hasn't been tested yet.
001 — 2024 — Type & Grid
Fibonacci as Structure
001
What happens when a type scale and a spatial grid share the same numerical origin?
The Fibonacci sequence — 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89 — is not a design system. It is a growth pattern. The question this project asked was whether a design system built from it would carry that organic quality into the work, or whether the mathematics would simply produce another set of arbitrary values dressed in natural authority.
The experiment began with a single seed value: 21px, chosen because it sits comfortably as a body text line-height and because its position in the sequence gives it useful neighbours on either side. From this, a full typographic scale was derived. Then a spatial grid. Then a series of layouts set exclusively using values from the resulting system.
Type scale applied at display size — 55px / 63px lh
Spatial grid derived from the same sequence
The grid that emerges is not uniform. It has rhythm in the way a piece of music has rhythm — intervals that repeat, vary, and occasionally surprise.
Spread from the resulting publication — all measurements derived from the Fibonacci sequence
The layouts that emerged from this constraint were neither predictable nor chaotic. Columns appeared at widths that felt considered. Type sat at sizes that had a natural relationship to one another. The system did not produce beauty automatically — it produced coherence, which is a different and arguably more useful thing.
What remains uncertain is whether the quality of the work derives from the Fibonacci origin of the system, or whether any internally consistent system would have produced a similar result. That question is probably unanswerable, and possibly beside the point.
Detail — baseline grid overlay
Fibonacci as Structure — 2024
004 — 2022 — Digital
Archive as Interface
004
An archive is not a library. Retrieval and discovery are different acts, and the interface should know the difference.
The project began with a collection of approximately 4,000 documents — letters, photographs, institutional records — held by a private family archive. The material had been digitised but not organised; it existed as a flat folder of files with inconsistent naming conventions and no metadata structure.
Conventional archival interfaces impose hierarchy: series, subseries, item. This works well for retrieval — if you know what you are looking for. It works poorly for discovery — if you do not. The family wanted both. They wanted to be able to find a specific document when needed, and to wander when not.
Rather than build a single interface that attempted to serve both purposes, the project proposed two entry modes: a structured index for retrieval, and an associative view for discovery. The associative view was the interesting design problem.
The question was not what to show, but what to withhold — and how to make the act of finding feel like the beginning of something rather than the end of a search.
Documents in the associative view are connected by metadata relationships: shared dates, shared named individuals, shared locations, shared document type. The interface surfaces these connections visually, without requiring the user to formulate a query. Moving between documents is a matter of following a thread.
The visual language of the interface was designed to feel more like a reading table than a database. Documents appear at a legible scale. Connections are indicated by proximity and by fine lines — not by colour or iconography. The system is quiet by design.
A secondary consideration was time. Archival material spans decades; some of the documents in this collection are over a century old. The interface needed to hold that span without trivialising it. Dates are always displayed in full. Documents from different periods are never visually equalised.
The most unexpected outcome of the project was how quickly the family began to describe their archive differently — not as a collection of documents, but as a collection of relationships between documents. The interface had changed not just how they navigated the material, but how they thought about what the material was.
The associative view surfaces connections based on shared metadata. It does not surface thematic or semantic connections — relationships that a human reader would recognise but that a database cannot encode. Whether this is a limitation to be solved technically, or an invitation for a different kind of interface entirely, remains an open question.
Archive as Interface — 2022
A prototype exploring site navigation as a spatial rather than hierarchical problem.
A tool for generating baseline grids from any chosen typographic sequence. Exports to CSS.
Enter any two values and a ratio; receive a complete spatial and typographic scale system.