A mammoth's head, half furred and living, half bare skull, with its tusks curving at the bottom, on black.

EDITORIAL · MAGAZINE AND BROCHURE · 2025–2026

Return of the Lostand Cyclone-4M.

01 · OVERVIEW

Magazine
and brochure

One is a 12-page magazine about
bringing extinct animals back. The
other is a tri-fold brochure for
Canada’s first space launch. Both
are dense, and I wanted both read to
the end, one slowly, one in the hand.
So I started with the type, because
type decides whether a page like
that gets read or skipped.

ROLE
Editorial DesignerSolo, end to end
CONTEXT
Self-initiatedReal subjects, no clientPrint, not published
SCOPE
Magazine, 12 pagesTri-fold brochureType systems and grids
TIMELINE
May 2025

02 · THE MAGAZINE COVER

The cover had
to say resurrection
before anyone read a word.

Return of the Lost is a journal on
de-extinction for Colossal
Biosciences. I pulled six covers I
admired and they agreed on one
thing: one specimen on a plain
ground, and red used once, big.
Then I asked what resurrection
looks like. A mirror, the animal
above its own skeleton, says it
came back. A cut, alive on one
side and bone on the other, says
it is made of both. I chose the
cut, set it alone on black, and
put the title above it in red.

The Return of the Lost cover laid flat, back and front, on a cream ground.
A person on a sofa holds the open magazine up in front of their face.
The magazine and its back cover lie on a lab table beside a microscope and a beaker.

03 · INSIDE THE MAGAZINE

Inside, two
typefaces set the tone
and every page
is white or black.

The copy is the real thing, kept word
for word, and it is dense. Dense copy
needs a quiet system, so I gave it
two typefaces, Fraunces for
headlines and pull quotes, Inter Tight
for everything else, and red only on
kickers, rules and a single word in a
headline. Every page is white or
black, never both on one spread; the
CRISPR pages and the closing go
black. Each spread started with five
references and one question: what
does this spread have to say?

Magazine spread 1: Contents and a hunter figure.
Magazine spread 2: Regretting, Reclaiming, Rewilding? with skulls.
Magazine spread 3: CRISPR-Cas9 on a black page.
A person reads the open magazine at a desk.
The magazine open on a lab table.
Magazine spread 4: De-Extinct and in Development.
Magazine spread 5: Good or God?.
Magazine spread 6: The Architects of Resurrection on a black page.

04 · THE BROCHURE

The brochure is
read in the hand,
so the fold
decides the order.

Cyclone-4M is a tri-fold for Maritime
Launch Services and Canada’s first
space launch. A brochure is read in
the hand, so the fold had to tell the
story. Closed, you meet the cover.
The first fold opens to the mission.
The full opening shows the site, the
rocket and the satellites at once.
Nothing is set tiny, every title is one
size and the body two, each leader
line lands on the part it names, and
the eight icons sit in one box each.
Equal boxes still looked unequal, so I
measured the ink in each icon and
sized them by it until they read
as one set.

The tri-fold brochure folded, shown as a mockup.
The outside of the brochure laid flat.
The inside of the brochure fully open.

05 · REFLECTION

Looking back
at both pieces,
what worked and
what I would change.

Both were built the same
way, so what I learned
on one held on the other.

WHAT WORKED

Setting the type first. Once each piece ran on
two typefaces and a fixed set of sizes, every
other decision got smaller. In the magazine,
keeping each page either all white or all black,
never both on one spread, made image
decisions easier.

WHAT I WOULD CHANGE

Make the mockups earlier. A flat export shows
the layout but not how the piece feels in the
hand. Get the brochure’s real fonts before
starting instead of using stand-ins. And design
the closing spread first, because the last page is
what a reader remembers.

The job was to
make dense information
readable. The type
did most of the work.

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