Three projects, three very different clients, one insistence on doing it properly.

The organizers came to me with forty vendors, zero consistent signage, and a market that moved to a new lot every six weeks. The brief was less "make it pretty" and more "make it findable at 9pm in the rain."

I built a modular sign system out of laminated riso prints and a single condensed typeface, so any vendor could assemble their own stall marker from five printed parts. The mark itself is a folded lantern silhouette that reads as a wordmark from twenty feet and an icon from two hundred.

Six months in, vendors started requesting the system for their own side businesses — which is the only metric that mattered.

Ferrous restores wrought-iron gates and balconies across the Alentejo. Their old site was a PDF pretending to be a webpage. They wanted something that photographed the craft honestly — no stock metal-texture backgrounds, no gradients pretending to be patina.

I shot the oxidation process myself over three visits and built the palette directly from those photographs — twelve rust tones sampled from real corrosion, not a swatch library. The scroll sequence tracks a single gate panel from ruin to restoration, timed to the actual eleven-day process.

Lighthouse still gives it a 98 on performance, which surprised me more than it should have.

Marginalia collects photographs of what readers scribble in library-book margins — arguments with the author, grocery lists, the occasional marriage proposal. My job was to typeset three hundred of these submissions into something readable without sanding down what made them worth collecting.

I set the printed commentary in a Fraunces italic to preserve the intimacy of handwriting while keeping it legible in a 9pt column, and let the scanned margin photographs run uncropped, gutter-to-gutter, ignoring the grid on purpose wherever the photo demanded it.

Issue four sold out its print run in eleven days.